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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pathfinders of the West, by A. C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Pathfinders of the West
+       Being the Thrilling Story of the Adventures of the Men Who
+       Discovered the Great Northwest: Radisson, La V�rendrye,
+       Lewis and Clark
+
+Author: A. C. Laut
+
+Release Date: April 20, 2006 [EBook #18216]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATHFINDERS OF THE WEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: Stealing from the Fort by Night.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Pathfinders of the West
+
+
+
+BEING
+
+THE THRILLING STORY OF THE ADVENTURES
+
+OF THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED THE GREAT NORTHWEST
+
+RADISSON, LA V�RENDRYE, LEWIS AND CLARK
+
+
+
+
+
+BY
+
+A. C. LAUT
+
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "LORDS OF THE NORTH," "HERALDS
+  OF EMPIRE," "STORY OF THE TRAPPER"
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+
+REMINGTON, GOODWIN, MARCHAND
+
+AND OTHERS
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP
+
+PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1904,
+
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+
+
+
+Set up and electrotyped.  Published November, 1904.  Reprinted February,
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+WILDWOOD PLACE, WASSAIC, N.Y.
+
+August 15, 1904.
+
+
+DEAR MR. SULTE:
+
+A few years ago, when I was a resident of the Far West and tried to trace
+the paths of early explorers, I found that all authorities--first,
+second, and third rate--alike referred to one source of information for
+their facts.  The name in the tell-tale footnote was invariably your own.
+
+While I assume _all_ responsibility for upsetting the apple cart of
+established opinions by this book, will you permit me to dedicate it to
+you as a slight token of esteem to the greatest living French-Canadian
+historian, from whom we have all borrowed and to whom few of us have
+rendered the tribute due?
+
+Faithfully,
+
+AGNES C. LAUT.
+
+
+ MR. BENJAMIN SULTE,
+ PRESIDENT ROYAL SOCIETY,
+ OTTAWA, CANADA.
+
+
+
+
+  THE GREAT NORTHWEST
+
+  I love thee, O thou great, wild, rugged land
+  Of fenceless field and snowy mountain height,
+  Uprearing crests all starry-diademed
+  Above the silver clouds!  A sea of light
+  Swims o'er thy prairies, shimmering to the sight
+  A rolling world of glossy yellow wheat
+  That runs before the wind in billows bright
+  As waves beneath the beat of unseen feet,
+  And ripples far as eye can see--as far and fleet!
+
+  Here's chances for every man!  The hands that work
+  Become the hands that rule!  Thy harvests yield
+  Only to him who toils; and hands that shirk
+  Must empty go!  And here the hands that wield
+  The sceptre work!  O glorious golden field!
+  O bounteous, plenteous land of poet's dream!
+  O'er thy broad plain the cloudless sun ne'er wheeled
+  But some dull heart was brightened by its gleam
+  To seize on hope and realize life's highest dream!
+
+  Thy roaring tempests sweep from out the north--
+  Ten thousand cohorts on the wind's wild mane--
+  No hand can check thy frost-steeds bursting forth
+  To gambol madly on the storm-swept plain!
+  Thy hissing snow-drifts wreathe their serpent train,
+  With stormy laughter shrieks the joy of might--
+  Or lifts, or falls, or wails upon the wane--
+  Thy tempests sweep their stormy trail of white
+  Across the deepening drifts--and man must die, or fight!
+
+  Yes, man must sink or fight, be strong or die!
+  That is thy law, O great, free, strenuous West!
+  The weak thou wilt make strong till he defy
+  Thy bufferings; but spacious prairie breast
+  Will never nourish weakling as its guest!
+  He must grow strong or die!  Thou givest all
+  An equal chance--to work, to do their best--
+  Free land, free hand--thy son must work or fall
+  Grow strong or die!  That message shrieks the storm-wind's call!
+
+  And so I love thee, great, free, rugged land
+  Of cloudless summer days, with west-wind croon,
+  And prairie flowers all dewy-diademed,
+  And twilights long, with blood-red, low-hung moon
+  And mountain peaks that glisten white each noon
+  Through purple haze that veils the western sky--
+  And well I know the meadow-lark's far rune
+  As up and down he lilts and circles high
+  And sings sheer joy--be strong, be free; be strong or die!
+
+
+
+
+Foreword
+
+The question will at once occur why no mention is made of Marquette and
+Jolliet and La Salle in a work on the pathfinders of the West.  The
+simple answer is--they were _not_ pathfinders.  Contrary to the notions
+imbibed at school, and repeated in all histories of the West,
+Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle did not discover the vast region
+beyond the Great Lakes.  Twelve years before these explorers had
+thought of visiting the land which the French hunter designated as the
+_Pays d'en Haut_, the West had already been discovered by the most
+intrepid _voyageurs_ that France produced,--men whose wide-ranging
+explorations exceeded the achievements of Cartier and Champlain and La
+Salle put together.
+
+It naturally rouses resentment to find that names revered for more than
+two centuries as the first explorers of the Great Northwest must give
+place to a name almost unknown.  It seems impossible that at this late
+date history should have to be rewritten.  Such is the fact _if we
+would have our history true_.  Not Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle
+discovered the West, but two poor adventurers, who sacrificed all
+earthly possessions to the enthusiasm for discovery, and incurred such
+bitter hostility from the governments of France and England that their
+names have been hounded to infamy.  These were Sieur Pierre Esprit
+Radisson and Sieur M�dard Chouart Groseillers, fur traders of Three
+Rivers, Quebec. [1]
+
+The explanation of the long oblivion obscuring the fame of these two
+men is very simple.  Radisson and Groseillers defied, first New France,
+then Old France, and lastly England.  While on friendly terms with the
+church, they did not make their explorations subservient to the
+propagation of the faith.  In consequence, they were ignored by both
+Church and State.  The _Jesuit Relations_ repeatedly refer to two young
+Frenchmen who went beyond Lake Michigan to a "Forked River" (the
+Mississippi), among the Sioux and other Indian tribes that used coal
+for fire because wood did not grow large enough on the prairie.
+Contemporaneous documents mention the exploits of the young Frenchmen.
+The State Papers of the Marine Department, Paris, contain numerous
+references to Radisson and Groseillers.  But, then, the _Jesuit
+Relations_ were not accessible to scholars, let alone the general
+public, until the middle of the last century, when a limited edition
+was reprinted of the Cramoisy copies published at the time the priests
+sent their letters home to France.  The contemporaneous writings of
+Marie de l'Incarnation, the Abb� Belmont, and Dollier de Casson were
+not known outside the circle of French savants until still later; and
+it is only within recent years that the Archives of Paris have been
+searched for historical data.  Meantime, the historians of France and
+England, animated by the hostility of their respective governments,
+either slurred over the discoveries of Radisson and Groseillers
+entirely, or blackened their memories without the slightest regard to
+truth.  It would, in fact, take a large volume to contradict and
+disprove half the lies written of these two men.  Instead of consulting
+contemporaneous documents,--which would have entailed both cost and
+labor,--modern writers have, unfortunately, been satisfied to serve up
+a rehash of the detractions written by the old historians.  In 1885
+came a discovery that punished such slovenly methods by practically
+wiping out the work of the pseudo-historians.  There was found in the
+British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and Hudson's Bay House, London,
+unmistakably authentic record of Radisson's voyages, written by
+himself.  The Prince Society of Boston printed two hundred and fifty
+copies of the collected Journals.  The Canadian Archives published the
+journals of the two last voyages.  Francis Parkman was too
+conscientious to ignore the importance of the find; but his history of
+the West was already written.  He made what reparation he could to
+Radisson's memory by appending a footnote to subsequent editions of two
+of his books, stating that Radisson and Groseillers' travels took them
+to the "Forked River" before 1660.  Some ten other lines are all that
+Mr. Parkman relates of Radisson; and the data for these brief
+references have evidently been drawn from Radisson's enemies, for the
+explorer is called "a renegade."  It is necessary to state this,
+because some writers, whose zeal for criticism was much greater than
+their qualifications, wanted to know why any one should attempt to
+write Radisson's life when Parkman had already done so.
+
+Radisson's life reads more like a second Robinson Crusoe than sober
+history.  For that reason I have put the corroborative evidence in
+footnotes, rather than cumber the movement of the main theme.  I am
+sorry to have loaded the opening parts with so many notes; but
+Radisson's voyages change the relative positions of the other explorers
+so radically that proofs must be given.  The footnotes are for the
+student and may be omitted by the general reader.  The study of
+Radisson arose from, using his later exploits on Hudson Bay as the
+subject of the novel, _Heralds of Empire_.  On the publication of that
+book, several letters came from the Western states asking how far I
+thought Radisson had gone beyond Lake Superior before he went to Hudson
+Bay.  Having in mind--I am sorry to say--mainly the early records of
+Radisson's enemies, I at first answered that I thought it very
+difficult to identify the discoverer's itinerary beyond the Great
+Lakes.  So many letters continued to come on the subject that I began
+to investigate contemporaneous documents.  The path followed by the
+explorer west of the Great Lakes--as given by Radisson himself--is here
+written.  Full corroboration of all that Radisson relates is to be
+found--as already stated--in chronicles written at the period of his
+life and in the State Papers.  Copies of these I have in my possession.
+Samples of the papers bearing on Radisson's times, copied from the
+Marine Archives, will be found in the Appendix.  One must either accept
+the explorer's word as conclusive,--even when he relates his own
+trickery,--or in rejecting his journal also reject as fictions the
+_Jesuit Relations_, the _Marine Archives_, _Dollier de Casson_, _Marie
+de l'Incarnation_, and the _Abb� Belmont_, which record the same events
+as Radisson.  In no case has reliance been placed on second-hand
+chronicles.  Oldmixon and Charlevoix must both have written from
+hearsay; therefore, though quoted in the footnotes, they are not given
+as conclusive proof.  The only means of identifying Radisson's routes
+are (1) by his descriptions of the countries, (2) his notes of the
+Indian tribes; so that personal knowledge of the territory is
+absolutely essential in following Radisson's narrative.  All the
+regions traversed by Radisson--the Ottawa, the St. Lawrence, the Great
+Lakes, Labrador, and the Great Northwest--I have visited, some of them
+many times, except the shores of Hudson Bay, and of that region I have
+some hundreds of photographs.
+
+Material for the accounts of the other pathfinders of the West has been
+drawn directly from the different explorers' journals.
+
+For historical matter I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. N. E.
+Dionne of the Parliamentary Library, Quebec, whose splendid sketch of
+Radisson and Groseillers, read before the Royal Society of Canada, does
+much to redeem the memory of the discoverers from ignominy; to Dr.
+George Bryce of Winnipeg, whose investigation of Hudson's Bay Archives
+adds a new chapter to Radisson's life; to Mr. Benjamin Sulte of Ottawa,
+whose destructive criticism of inaccuracies in old and modern records
+has done so much to stop people writing history out of their heads and
+to put research on an honest basis; and to M. Edouard Richard for
+scholarly advice relating to the Marine Archives, which he has
+exploited so thoroughly.  For transcripts and archives now out of
+print, thanks are due Mr. L. P. Sylvain of the Parliamentary Library,
+Ottawa, the officials of the Archives Department, Ottawa, Mr. F. C.
+Wurtele of Quebec, Professor Andrew Baird of Winnipeg, Mr. Alfred
+Matthews of the Prince Society, Boston, the Hon. Jacob V. Brower and
+Mr. Warren Upham of St. Paul.  Mr. Lawrence J. Burpee of Ottawa was so
+good as to give me a reading of his exhaustive notes on La V�rendrye
+and of data found on the Radisson family.  To Mrs. Fred Paget of
+Ottawa, the daughter of a Hudson's Bay Company officer, and to Mr. and
+Mrs. C. C. Farr of the Northern Ottawa, I am indebted for interesting
+facts on life in the fur posts.  Miss Talbot of Winnipeg obtained from
+retired officers of the Hudson's Bay Company a most complete set of
+photographs relating to the fur trade.  To her and to those officers
+who loaned old heirlooms to be photographed, I beg to express my
+cordial appreciation.  And the thanks of all who write on the North are
+permanently due Mr. C. C. Chipman, Chief Commissioner of the Hudson's
+Bay Company, for unfailing courtesy in extending information.
+
+
+WILDWOOD PLACE,
+
+WASSAIC, N.Y.
+
+
+[1] I of course refer to the West as beyond the Great Lakes; for
+Nicotet, in 1634, and two nameless Frenchmen--servants of Jean de
+Lauzon--in 1654, had been beyond the Sault.
+
+
+
+
+Just as this volume was going to the printer, I received a copy of the
+very valuable Minnesota _Memoir_, Vol. VI, compiled by the Hon. J. V.
+Brower of St. Paul, to whom my thanks are due for this excellent
+contribution to Western annals.  It may be said that the authors of
+this volume have done more than any other writers to vindicate Radisson
+and Groseillers as explorers of the West.  The very differences of
+opinion over the regions visited establish the fact that Radisson _did_
+explore parts of Minnesota.  I have purposely avoided trying to say
+_what_ parts of Minnesota he exploited, because, it seems to me, the
+controversy is futile.  Radisson's memory has been the subject of
+controversy from the time of his life.  The controversy--first between
+the governments of France and England, subsequently between the French
+and English historians--has eclipsed the real achievements of Radisson.
+To me it seems non-essential as to whether Radisson camped on an island
+in the Mississippi, or only visited the region of that island.  The
+fact remains that he discovered the Great Northwest, meaning by that
+the region west of the Mississippi.  The same dispute has obscured his
+explorations of Hudson Bay, French writers maintaining that he went
+overland to the North and put his feet in the waters of the bay, the
+English writers insisting that he only crossed over the watershed
+toward Hudson Bay.  Again, the fact remains that he did what others had
+failed to do--discovered an overland route to the bay.  I am sorry that
+Radisson is accused in this _Memoir_ of intentionally falsifying his
+relations in two respects, (1) in adding a fanciful year to the
+1658-1660 voyage; (2) in saying that he had voyaged down the
+Mississippi to Mexico.  (1) Internal evidence plainly shows that
+Radisson's first four voyages were written twenty years afterward, when
+he was in London, and not while on the voyage across the Atlantic with
+Cartwright, the Boston commissioner.  It is the most natural thing in
+the world that Radisson, who had so often been to the wilds, should
+have mixed his dates.  Every slip as to dates is so easily checked by
+contemporaneous records--which, themselves, need to be checked--that it
+seems too bad to accuse Radisson of wilfully lying in the matter.  When
+Radisson lied it was to avoid bloodshed, and not to exalt himself.  If
+he had had glorification of self in mind, he would not have set down
+his own faults so unblushingly; for instance, where he deceives M.
+Colbert of Paris.  (2) Radisson does not try to give the impression
+that he went to Mexico.  The sense of the context is that he met an
+Indian tribe--Illinois, Mandans, Omahas, or some other--who lived next
+to another tribe who told _of_ the Spaniards.  I feel almost sure that
+the scholarly Mr. Benjamin Sulte is right in his letter to me when he
+suggests that Radisson's manuscript has been mixed by transposition of
+pages or paragraphs, rather than that Radisson himself was confused in
+his account.  At the same time every one of the contributors to the
+Minnesota _Memoir_ deserves the thanks of all who love _true_ history.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+Since the above foreword was written, the contents of this volume have
+appeared serially in four New York magazines.  The context of the book
+was slightly abridged in these articles, so that a very vital
+distinction--namely, the difference between what is given as in
+dispute, and what is given as incontrovertible fact--was lost; but what
+was my amusement to receive letters from all parts of the West all but
+challenging me to a duel.  One wants to know "how a reputable author
+dare" suggest that Radisson's voyages be taken as authentic.  There is
+no "dare" about it.  It is a fact.  For any "reputable" historian to
+suggest--as two recently have--that Radisson's voyages are a
+fabrication, is to stamp that historian as a pretender who has not
+investigated a single record contemporaneous with Radisson's life.  One
+cannot consult documents contemporaneous with his life and not learn
+instantly that he was a very live fact of the most troublesome kind the
+governments of France and England ever had to accept.  That is why it
+impresses me as a presumption that is almost comical for any modern
+writer to condescend to say that he "accepts" or "rejects" this or that
+part of Radisson's record.  If he "rejects" Radisson, he also rejects
+the _Marine Archives of Paris_, and the _Jesuit Relations_, which are
+the recognized sources of our early history.
+
+Another correspondent furiously denounces Radisson as a liar because he
+mixes his dates of the 1660 trip.  It would be just as reasonable to
+call La Salle a liar because there are discrepancies in the dates of
+his exploits, as to call Radisson a liar for the slips in his dates.
+When the mistakes can be checked from internal evidence, one is hardly
+justified in charging falsification.
+
+A third correspondent is troubled by the reference to the Mascoutin
+Indians being _beyond_ the Mississippi.  State documents establish this
+fact.  I am not responsible for it; and Radisson could not circle
+west-northwest from the Mascoutins to the great encampments of the
+Sioux without going far west of the Mississippi.  Even if the Jesuits
+make a slip in referring to the Sioux's use of some kind of coal for
+fire because there was no wood on the prairie, and really mean turf or
+buffalo refuse,--which I have seen the Sioux use for fire,--the fact is
+that only the tribes far west of the Mississippi habitually used such
+substitutes for wood.
+
+My Wisconsin correspondents I have offended by saying that Radisson
+went beyond the Wisconsin; my Minnesota friends, by saying that he went
+beyond Minnesota; and my Manitoba co-workers of past days, by
+suggesting that he ever went beyond Manitoba.  The fact remains that
+when we try to identify Radisson's voyages, we must take his own
+account of his journeyings; and that account establishes him as the
+Discoverer of the Northwest.
+
+For those who know, I surely do not need to state that there is no
+picture of Radisson extant, and that some of the studies of his life
+are just as genuine (?) as alleged old prints of his likeness.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON
+
+ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO EXPLORE THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST,
+AND THE NORTH
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
+
+The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk
+Valley--In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
+escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the
+Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE
+
+Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the
+Iroquois Mission--He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the
+Thousand Islands--Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as
+Prisoners of War--Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+RADISSON'S THIRD VOYAGE
+
+The Discovery of the Great Northwest--Radisson and his Brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, visit what are now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and the
+Canadian Northwest--Radisson's Prophecy on first beholding the
+West--Twelve Years before Marquette and Jolliet, Radisson sees the
+Mississippi--The Terrible Remains of Dollard's Fight seen on the Way
+down the Ottawa--Why Radisson's Explorations have been ignored
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+RADISSON'S FOURTH VOYAGE
+
+The Success of the Explorers arouses Envy--It becomes known that they
+have heard of the Famous Sea of the North--When they ask Permission to
+resume their Explorations, the French Governor refuses except on
+Condition of receiving Half the Profits--In Defiance, the Explorers
+steal off at Midnight--They return with a Fortune and are driven from
+New France
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+RADISSON RENOUNCES ALLEGIANCE TO TWO CROWNS
+
+Rival Traders thwart the Plans of the Discoverers--Entangled in
+Lawsuits, the Two French Explorers go to England--The Organization of
+the Hudson's Bay Fur Company--Radisson the Storm-centre of
+International Intrigue--Boston Merchants in the Struggle to capture the
+Fur Trade
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+RADISSON GIVES UP A CAREER IN THE NAVY FOR THE FUR TRADE
+
+Though opposed by the Monopolists of Quebec, he secures Ships for a
+Voyage to Hudson Bay--Here he encounters a Pirate Ship from Boston and
+an English Ship of the Hudson's Bay Company--How he plays his Cards to
+win against Both Rivals
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE LAST VOYAGE OF RADISSON TO HUDSON BAY
+
+France refuses to restore the Confiscated Furs and Radisson tries to
+redeem his Fortune--Re�ngaged by England, he captures back Fort Nelson,
+but comes to Want in his Old Age--His Character
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY OF
+THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, THE MISSOURI UPLANDS, AND THE VALLEY OF THE
+SASKATCHEWAN
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA
+
+M. de la V�rendrye continues the Exploration of the Great Northwest by
+establishing a Chain of Fur Posts across the Continent--Privations of
+the Explorers and the Massacre of Twenty Followers--His Sons visit the
+Mandans and discover the Rockies--The Valley of the Saskatchewan is
+next explored, but Jealousy thwarts the Explorer, and he dies in Poverty
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE LEADS SAMUEL HEARNE TO THE ARCTIC
+CIRCLE AND ATHABASCA REGION
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SAMUEL HEARNE
+
+The Adventures of Hearne in his Search for the Coppermine River and
+Northwest Passage--Hilarious Life of Wassail led by Governor
+Norton--The Massacre of the Eskimo by Hearne's Indians North of the
+Arctic Circle--Discovery of the Athabasca Country--Hearne becomes
+Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but is captured by the
+French--Death of Norton and Suicide of Matonabbee
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES--HOW MACKENZIE CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES
+AND LEWIS AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES
+
+How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed
+across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the Question of a
+Northwest Passage
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LEWIS AND CLARK
+
+The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend
+the Columbia to the Pacific--Exciting Adventures on the Ca�ons of the
+Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone--Lewis'
+Escape from Hostiles
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Stealing from the Fort by Night . . . . . . Frontispiece
+
+Map of the Great Fur Country
+
+Three Rivers in 1757
+
+Map of the Iroquois Country in the Days of Radisson
+
+Albany from an Old Print
+
+The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time
+
+Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in Holland
+
+One of the Earliest Maps of the Great Lakes
+
+Paddling past Hostiles
+
+Jogues, the Jesuit Missionary, who was tortured by the Mohawks
+
+Ch�teau de Ramezay, Montreal
+
+A Cree Brave, with the Wampum String
+
+An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux
+
+Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in Montreal
+
+Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River
+
+Montreal in 1760
+
+Ch�teau St. Louis, Quebec, 1669
+
+A Parley on the Plains
+
+Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three Rivers
+
+Skin for Skin, Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay Company
+
+Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from
+  Tea-chests at York Factory
+
+Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower
+  Fort Garry, Red River
+
+Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight
+
+Fights at the Foothills of the Rockies, between Crows and Snakes
+
+Each Man landed with Pack on his Back and trotted away over Portages
+
+A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands
+
+A Group of Cree Indians
+
+The Soldiers marched out from Mount Royal for the Western Sea
+
+Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca River
+
+The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains
+
+Hungry Hall, 1870
+
+A Monarch of the Plains
+
+Fur Traders towed down the Saskatchewan in the Summer of 1900
+
+Tepees dotted the Valley
+
+An Eskimo Belle
+
+Samuel Hearne
+
+Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle
+
+Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun
+
+Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago
+
+Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's drawing, 1733-1747
+
+Fort Prince of Wales
+
+Beaver Coin of the Hudson's Bay Company
+
+Alexander Mackenzie
+
+Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for the
+  Value of Three Beaver Skins
+
+Quill and Beadwork on Buckskin
+
+Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior
+
+Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River
+
+Slave Lake Indians
+
+Good Hope, Mackenzie River, Hudson's Bay Company Fort
+
+The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight Sun
+
+Captain Meriwether Lewis
+
+Captain William Clark
+
+Tracking up Stream
+
+Typical Mountain Trapper
+
+The Discovery of the Great Falls
+
+Fighting a Grizzly
+
+Packer carrying Goods across Portage
+
+Spying on Enemy's Fort
+
+Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies
+
+On Guard
+
+Indians of the Up-country or Pays d'en Haut
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON
+
+ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO
+  EXPLORE THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST,
+  AND THE NORTH
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Map of the Great Fur Company.]
+
+
+
+Pathfinders of the West
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+1651-1653
+
+RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
+
+The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk
+Valley--In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
+escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the
+Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape
+
+
+Early one morning in the spring of 1652 three young men left the little
+stockaded fort of Three Rivers, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence,
+for a day's hunting in the marshes of Lake St. Peter.  On one side were
+the forested hills, purple with the mists of rising vapor and still
+streaked with white patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the
+sunlight.  On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence,
+more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of
+rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese
+flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just
+as they do to-day.  Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice
+poured their spring flood into the St. Lawrence.
+
+The hunters were very young.  Only hunters rash with the courage of
+untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all
+the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the
+little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year.
+Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three
+Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois.
+The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had
+been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in
+the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France.  It was from
+Three Rivers that Piescaret, the famous Algonquin chief who could
+outrun a deer, had set out against the Iroquois, turning his snowshoes
+back to front, so that the track seemed to lead north when he was
+really going south, and then, having thrown his pursuers off the trail,
+coming back on his own footsteps, slipping up stealthily on the
+Iroquois that were following the false scent, and tomahawking the
+laggards.[1]  It was from Three Rivers that the Mohawks had captured
+the Algonquin girl who escaped by slipping off the thongs that bound
+her.  Stepping over the prostrate forms of her sleeping guards, such a
+fury of revenge possessed her that she seized an axe and brained the
+nearest sleeper, then eluded her pursuers by first hiding in a hollow
+tree and afterward diving under the debris of a beaver dam.
+
+[Illustration: Three Rivers in 1757.]
+
+These things were known to every inhabitant of Three Rivers.  Farmers
+had flocked into the little fort and could venture back to their fields
+only when armed with a musket.[2]  Yet the three young hunters rashly
+left the shelter of the fort walls and took the very dangerous path
+that led between the forests and the water.  One of the young men was
+barely in his seventeenth year.[3]  This was Pierre Esprit Radisson,
+from St. Malo, the town of the famous Cartier.  Young Radisson had only
+come to New France the year before, and therefore could not realize the
+dangers of Indian warfare.  Like boys the world over, the three went
+along, boasting how they would fight if the Indians came.  One skirted
+the forest, on the watch for Iroquois, the others kept to the water, on
+the lookout for game.  About a mile from Three Rivers they encountered
+a herdsman who warned them to keep out from the foot of the hills.
+Things that looked like a multitude of heads had risen out of the earth
+back there, he said, pointing to the forests.  That set the young
+hunters loading their pistols and priming muskets.  It must also have
+chilled their zest; for, shooting some ducks, one of the young men
+presently declared that he had had enough--he was going back.  With
+that daring which was to prove both the lodestar and the curse of his
+life, young Radisson laughed to scorn the sudden change of mind.
+Thereupon the first hunter was joined by the second, and the two went
+off in high dudgeon.  With a laugh, Pierre Radisson marched along
+alone, foreshadowing his after life,--a type of every pathfinder facing
+the dangers of the unknown with dauntless scorn, an immortal type of
+the world-hero.
+
+Shooting at every pace and hilarious over his luck, Radisson had
+wandered some nine miles from the fort, when he came to a stream too
+deep to ford and realized that he already had more game than he could
+possibly carry.  Hiding in hollow trees what he could not bring back,
+he began trudging toward Three Rivers with a string of geese, ducks,
+and odd teal over his shoulders, Wading swollen brooks and scrambling
+over windfalls, he retraced his way without pause till he caught sight
+of the town chapel glimmering in the sunlight against the darkening
+horizon above the river.  He was almost back where his comrades had
+left him; so he sat down to rest.  The cowherd had driven his cattle
+back to Three Rivers.[4]  The river came lapping through the rushes.
+There was a clacking of wild-fowl flocking down to their marsh nests;
+perhaps a crane flopped through the reeds; but Radisson, who had
+laughed the nervous fears of the others to scorn, suddenly gave a start
+at the lonely sounds of twilight.  Then he noticed that his pistols
+were water-soaked.  Emptying the charges, he at once reloaded, and with
+characteristic daring crept softly back to reconnoitre the woods.
+Dodging from tree to tree, he peered up and down the river.  Great
+flocks of ducks were swimming on the water.  That reassured him, for
+the bird is more alert to alarm than man.  The fort was almost within
+call.  Radisson determined to have a shot at such easy quarry; but as
+he crept through the grass toward the game, he almost stumbled over
+what rooted him to the spot with horror.  Just as they had fallen,
+naked and scalped, with bullet and hatchet wounds all over their
+bodies, lay his comrades of the morning, dead among the rushes.
+Radisson was too far out to get back to the woods.  Stooping, he tried
+to grope to the hiding of the rushes.  As he bent, half a hundred heads
+rose from the grasses, peering which way he might go.  They were
+behind, before, on all sides--his only hope was a dash for the
+cane-grown river, where he might hide by diving and wading, till
+darkness gave a chance for a rush to the fort.  Slipping bullet and
+shot in his musket as he ran, and ramming down the paper, hoping
+against hope that he had not been seen, he dashed through the
+brushwood.  A score of guns crashed from the forest.[5]  Before he
+realized the penalty that the Iroquois might exact for such an act, he
+had fired back; but they were upon him.  He was thrown down and
+disarmed.  When he came giddily to his senses, he found himself being
+dragged back to the woods, where the Iroquois flaunted the fresh scalps
+of his dead friends.  Half drawn, half driven, he was taken to the
+shore.  Here, a flotilla of canoes lay concealed where he had been
+hunting wild-fowl but a few hours before.  Fires were kindled, and the
+crotched sticks driven in the ground to boil the kettle for the evening
+meal.  The young Frenchman was searched, stripped, and tied round the
+waist with a rope, the Indians yelling and howling like so many wolves
+all the while till a pause was given their jubilation by the alarm of a
+scout that the French and Algonquins were coming.  In a trice, the fire
+was out and covered.  A score of young braves set off to reconnoitre.
+Fifty remained at the boats; but if Radisson hoped for a rescue, he was
+doomed to disappointment.  The warriors returned.  Seventy Iroquois
+gathered round a second fire for the night.  The one predominating
+passion of the savage nature is bravery.  Lying in ambush, they had
+heard this French youth laugh at his comrades' fears.  In defiance of
+danger, they had seen him go hunting alone.  After he had heard an
+alarm, he had daringly come out to shoot at the ducks.  And, then, boy
+as he was, when attacked he had instantly fired back at numerous enough
+enemies to have intimidated a score of grown men.  There is not the
+slightest doubt it was Radisson's bravery that now saved him from the
+fate of his companions.
+
+His clothes were returned.  While the evening meal was boiling, young
+warriors dressed and combed the Frenchman's hair after the manner of
+braves.  They daubed his cheeks with war-paint; and when they saw that
+their rancid meats turned him faint, they boiled meat in clean water
+and gave him meal browned on burning sand.[6]  He did not struggle to
+escape, so he was now untied.  That night he slept between two warriors
+under a common blanket, through which he counted the stars.  For fifty
+years his home was to be under the stars.  It is typically Radisson
+when he could add: "I slept a sound sleep; for they wakened me upon the
+breaking of the day."  In the morning they embarked in thirty-seven
+canoes, two Indians in each boat, with Radisson tied to the cross-bar
+of one, the scalps lying at his feet.  Spreading out on the river, they
+beat their paddles on the gunwales of the canoes, shot off guns, and
+uttered the shrill war-cry--"Ah-oh!  Ah-oh!  Ah-oh!" [7]  Lest this
+were not sufficient defiance to the penned-up fort on the river bank,
+the chief stood up in his canoe, signalled silence, and gave three
+shouts.  At once the whole company answered till the hills rang; and
+out swung the fleet of canoes with more shouting and singing and firing
+of guns, each paddle-stroke sounding the death knell to the young
+Frenchman's hopes.
+
+By sunset they were among the islands at the mouth of the Richelieu,
+where muskrats scuttled through the rushes and wild-fowl clouded the
+air.  The south shore of Lake St. Peter was heavily forested; the
+north, shallow.  The lake was flooded with spring thaw, and the Mohawks
+could scarcely find camping-ground among the islands.  The young
+prisoner was deathly sick from the rank food that he had eaten and
+heart-sick from the widening distance between himself and Three Rivers.
+Still, they treated him kindly, saying, "Chagon!  Chagon!--Be merry!
+Cheer up!"  The fourth day up the Richelieu, he was embarked without
+being fastened to the cross-bar, and he was given a paddle.  Fresh to
+the work, Radisson made a labor of his oar.  The Iroquois took the
+paddle and taught him how to give the light, deft, feather strokes of
+the Indian canoeman.  On the river they met another band of warriors,
+and the prisoner was compelled to show himself a trophy of victory and
+to sing songs for his captors.  That evening the united bands kindled
+an enormous campfire and with the scalps of the dead flaunting from
+spear heads danced the scalp dance, re�nacting in pantomime all the
+episodes of the massacre to the monotonous chant-chant, of a recitative
+relating the foray.  At the next camping-ground, Radisson's hair was
+shaved in front and decorated on top with the war-crest of a brave.
+Having translated the white man into a savage, they brought him one of
+the tin looking-glasses used by Indians to signal in the sun.  "I,
+viewing myself all in a pickle," relates Radisson, "smeared with red
+and black, covered with such a top, . . . could not but fall in love
+with myself, if I had not had better instructions to shun the sin of
+pride."
+
+Radisson saw that apparent compliance with the Mohawks might win him a
+chance to escape; so he was the first to arise in the morning, wakening
+the others and urging them that it was time to break camp.  The stolid
+Indians were not to be moved by an audacious white boy.  Watching the
+young prisoner, the keepers lay still, feigning sleep.  Radisson rose.
+They made no protest.  He wandered casually down to the water side.
+One can guess that the half-closed eyelids of his guards opened a
+trifle: was the mouse trying to get away from the cat?  To the Indians'
+amusement, instead of trying to escape, Radisson picked up a spear and
+practised tossing it, till a Mohawk became so interested that he jumped
+up and taught the young Frenchman the proper throws.  That day the
+Indians gave him the present of a hunting-knife.  North of Lake
+Champlain, the river became so turbulent that they were forced to land
+and make a _portage_.  Instead of lagging, as captives frequently did
+from very fear as they approached nearer and nearer what was almost
+certain to mean death-torture in the Iroquois villages--Radisson
+hurried over the rocks, helping the older warriors to carry their
+packs.  At night he was the first to cut wood for the camp fire.
+
+About a week from the time they had left Lake St. Peter, they entered
+Lake Champlain.  On the shores of the former had been enacted the most
+hideous of all Indian customs--the scalp dance.  On the shores of the
+latter was performed one of the most redeeming rites of Indian warfare.
+Round a small pool of water a coppice of branches was interlaced.  Into
+the water were thrown hot stones till the enclosure was steaming.  Here
+each warrior took a sweat-bath of purification to prepare for reunion
+with his family.  Invoking the spirits as they bathed, the warriors
+emerged washed--as they thought--of all blood-guilt.[8]
+
+[Illustration: Map of the Iroquois country in the days of Radisson.]
+
+In the night shots sounded through the heavy silence of the forest, and
+the Mohawks embarked in alarm, compelling their white prisoner to lie
+flat in the bottom of the canoe.  In the morning when he awakened, he
+found the entire band hidden among the rushes of the lake.  They spent
+several days on Lake Champlain, then glided past wooded mountains down
+a calm river to Lake George, where canoes were abandoned and the
+warriors struck westward through dense forests to the country of the
+Iroquois.  Two days from the lake slave women met the returning braves,
+and in Radisson's words, "loaded themselves like mules with baggage."
+On this woodland march Radisson won golden opinions for himself by two
+acts: struck by an insolent young brave, he thrashed the culprit
+soundly; seeing an old man staggering under too heavy a load, the white
+youth took the burden on his own shoulders.
+
+The return of the warriors to their villages was always celebrated as a
+triumph.  The tribe marched out to meet them, singing, firing guns,
+shouting a welcome, dancing as the Israelites danced of old when
+victors returned from battle.  Men, women, and children lined up on
+each side armed with clubs and whips to scourge the captives.  Well for
+Radisson that he had won the warriors' favor; for when the time came
+for him to run the gantlet of Iroquois _diableries_, instead of being
+slowly led, with trussed arms and shackled feet, he was stripped free
+and signalled to run so fast that his tormentors could not hit him.
+Shrieks of laughter from the women, shouts of applause from the men,
+always greeted the racer who reached the end of the line unscathed.  A
+captive Huron woman, who had been adopted by the tribe, caught the
+white boy as he dashed free of a single blow clear through the lines of
+tormentors.  Leading him to her cabin, she fed and clothed him.
+Presently a band of braves marched up, demanded the surrender of
+Radisson, and took him to the Council Lodge of the Iroquois for
+judgment.
+
+Old men sat solemnly round a central fire, smoking their calumets in
+silence.  Radisson was ordered to sit down.  A coal of fire was put in
+the bowl of the great Council Pipe and passed reverently round the
+assemblage.  Then the old Huron woman entered, gesticulating and
+pleading for the youth's life.  The men smoked on silently with deep,
+guttural "ho-ho's," meaning "yes, yes, we are pleased."  The woman was
+granted permission to adopt Radisson as a son.  Radisson had won his
+end.  Diplomacy and courage had saved his life.  It now remained to
+await an opportunity for escape.
+
+Radisson bent all his energies to become a great hunter.  He was given
+firearms, and daily hunted with the family of his adoption.  It so
+happened that the family had lost a son in the wars, whose name had
+signified the same as Radisson's--that is, "a stone"; so the Pierre of
+Three Rivers became the Orimha of the Mohawks.  The Iroquois husband of
+the woman who had befriended him gave such a feast to the Mohawk braves
+as befitted the prestige of a warrior who had slain nineteen enemies
+with his own hand.  Three hundred young Mohawks sat down to a collation
+of moose nose and beaver tails and bears' paws, served by slaves.  To
+this banquet Radisson was led, decked out in colored blankets with
+garnished leggings and such a wealth of wampum strings hanging from
+wrists, neck, hair, and waist that he could scarcely walk.  Wampum
+means more to the Indian than money to the white man.  It represents
+not only wealth but social standing, and its value may be compared to
+the white man's estimate of pink pearls.  Diamond-cutters seldom spend
+more than two weeks in polishing a good stone.  An Indian would spend
+thirty days in perfecting a single bit of shell into fine wampum.
+Radisson's friends had ornamented him for the feast in order to win the
+respect of the Mohawks for the French boy.  Striking his hatchet
+through a kettle of sagamite to signify thus would he break peace to
+all Radisson's foes, the old Iroquois warrior made a speech to the
+assembled guests.  The guests clapped their hands and shouted, "Chagon,
+Orimha!--Be merry, Pierre!"  The Frenchman had been formally adopted as
+a Mohawk.
+
+
+The forests were now painted in all the glories of autumn.  All the
+creatures of the woodlands shook off the drowsy laziness of summer and
+came down from the uplands seeking haunts for winter retreat.  Moose
+and deer were on the move.  Beaver came splashing down-stream to
+plaster up their wattled homes before frost.  Bear and lynx and marten,
+all were restless as the autumn winds instinct with coming storm.  This
+is the season when the Indian sets out to hunt and fight.  Furnished
+with clothing, food, and firearms, Radisson left the Mohawk Valley with
+three hunters.  By the middle of August, the rind of the birch is in
+perfect condition for peeling.  The first thing the hunters did was to
+slit off the bark of a thick-girthed birch and with cedar linings make
+themselves a skiff.  Then they prepared to lay up a store of meat for
+the winter's war-raids.  Before ice forms a skim across the still
+pools, nibbled chips betray where a beaver colony is at work; so the
+hunters began setting beaver traps.  One night as they were returning
+to their wigwam, there came through the leafy darkness the weird sound
+of a man singing.  It was a solitary Algonquin captive, who called out
+that he had been on the track of a bear since daybreak.  He probably
+belonged to some well-known Iroquois, for he was welcomed to the
+camp-fire.  The sight of a face from Three Rivers roused the
+Algonquin's memories of his northern home.  In the noise of the
+crackling fire, he succeeded in telling Radisson, without being
+overheard by the Iroquois, that he had been a captive for two years and
+longed to escape.
+
+"Do you love the French?" the Algonquin asked Radisson.
+
+"Do you love the Algonquin?" returned Radisson, knowing they were
+watched.
+
+"As I do my own nation."  Then leaning across to Radisson,
+"Brother--white man!--Let us escape!  The Three Rivers--it is not far
+off!  Will you live like a Huron in bondage, or have your liberty with
+the French?"  Then, lowering his voice, "Let us kill all three this
+night when they are asleep!"
+
+From such a way of escape, the French youth held back.  The Algonquin
+continued to urge him.  By this time, Radisson must have heard from
+returning Iroquois warriors that they had slain the governor of Three
+Rivers, Duplessis-Kerbodot, and eleven other Frenchmen, among whom was
+the husband of Radisson's eldest sister, Marguerite.[9]
+
+While Radisson was still hesitating, the suspicious Iroquois demanded
+what so much whispering was about; but the alert Algonquin promptly
+quieted their fears by trumping up some hunting story.  Wearied from
+their day's hunt, the three Mohawks slept heavily round the camp-fire.
+They had not the least suspicion of danger, for they had stacked their
+arms carelessly against the trees of the forest.  Terrified lest the
+Algonquin should attempt to carry out his threat, Radisson pretended to
+be asleep.  Rising noiselessly, the Algonquin sat down by the fire.
+The Mohawks slept on.  The Algonquin gave Radisson a push.  The French
+boy looked up to see the Algonquin studying the postures of the
+sleeping forms.  The dying fire glimmered like a blotch of blood under
+the trees.  Stepping stealthy as a cat over the sleeping men, the
+Indian took possession of their firearms.  Drawn by a kind of horror,
+Radisson had risen.  The Algonquin thrust one of the tomahawks into the
+French lad's hands and pointed without a word at the three sleeping
+Mohawks.  Then the Indian began the black work.  The Mohawk nearest the
+fire never knew that he had been struck, and died without a sound.
+Radisson tried to imitate the relentless Algonquin, but, unnerved with
+horror, he bungled the blow and lost hold of the hatchet just as it
+struck the Mohawk's head.  The Iroquois sprang up with a shout that
+awakened the third man, but the Algonquin was ready.  Radisson's blow
+proved fatal.  The victim reeled back dead, and the third man was
+already despatched by the Algonquin.
+
+Radisson was free.  It was a black deed that freed him, but not half so
+black as the deeds perpetrated in civilized wars for less cause; and
+for that deed Radisson was to pay swift retribution.
+
+Taking the scalps as trophies to attest his word, the Algonquin threw
+the bodies into the river.  He seized all the belongings of the dead
+men but one gun and then launched out with Radisson on the river.  The
+French youth was conscience-stricken.  "I was sorry to have been in
+such an encounter," he writes, "but it was too late to repent."  Under
+cover of the night mist and shore foliage, they slipped away with the
+current.  At first dawn streak, while the mist still hid them, they
+landed, carried their canoe to a sequestered spot in the dense forest,
+and lay hidden under the upturned skiff all that day, tormented by
+swarms of mosquitoes and flies, but not daring to move from
+concealment.  At nightfall, they again launched down-stream, keeping
+always in the shadows of the shore till mist and darkness shrouded
+them, then sheering off for mid-current, where they paddled for dear
+life.  Where camp-fires glimmered on the banks, they glided past with
+motionless paddles.  Across Lake Champlain, across the Richelieu, over
+long _portages_ where every shadow took the shape of an ambushed
+Iroquois, for fourteen nights they travelled, when at last with many
+windings and false alarms they swept out on the wide surface of Lake
+St. Peter in the St. Lawrence.
+
+Within a day's journey of Three Rivers, they were really in greater
+danger than they had been in the forests of Lake Champlain.  Iroquois
+had infested that part of the St. Lawrence for more than a year.  The
+forest of the south shore, the rush-grown marshes, the wooded islands,
+all afforded impenetrable hiding.  It was four in the morning when they
+reached Lake St. Peter.  Concealing their canoe, they withdrew to the
+woods, cooked their breakfast, covered the fire, and lay down to sleep.
+In a couple of hours the Algonquin impatiently wakened Radisson and
+urged him to cross the lake to the north shore on the Three Rivers
+side.  Radisson warned the Indian that the Iroquois were ever lurking
+about Three Rivers.  The Indian would not wait till sunset.  "Let us
+go," he said.  "We are past fear.  Let us shake off the yoke of these
+whelps that have killed so many French and black robes (priests). . . .
+If you come not now that we are so near, I leave you, and will tell the
+governor you were afraid to come."
+
+Radisson's judgment was overruled by the impatient Indian.  They pushed
+their skiff out from the rushes.  The water lay calm as a sea of
+silver.  They paddled directly across to get into hiding on the north
+shore.  Halfway across Radisson, who was at the bow, called out that he
+saw shadows on the water ahead.  The Indian stood up and declared that
+the shadow was the reflection of a flying bird.  Barely had they gone a
+boat length when the shadows multiplied.  They were the reflections of
+Iroquois ambushed among the rushes.  Heading the canoe back for the
+south shore, they raced for their lives.  The Iroquois pursued in their
+own boats.  About a mile from the shore, the strength of the fugitives
+fagged.  Knowing that the Iroquois were gaining fast, Radisson threw
+out the loathsome scalps that the Algonquin had persisted in carrying.
+By that strange fatality which seems to follow crime, instead of
+sinking, the hairy scalps floated on the surface of the water back to
+the pursuing Iroquois.  Shouts of rage broke from the warriors.
+Radisson's skiff was so near the south shore that he could see the
+pebbled bottom of the lake; but the water was too deep to wade and too
+clear for a dive, and there was no driftwood to afford hiding.  Then a
+crash of musketry from the Iroquois knocked the bottom out of the
+canoe.  The Algonquin fell dead with two bullet wounds in his head and
+the canoe gradually filled, settled, and sank, with the young Frenchman
+clinging to the cross-bar mute as stone.  Just as it disappeared under
+water, Radisson was seized, and the dead Algonquin was thrown into the
+Mohawk boats.
+
+Radisson alone remained to pay the penalty of a double crime; and he
+might well have prayed for the boat to sink.  The victors shouted their
+triumph.  Hurrying ashore, they kindled a great fire.  They tore the
+heart from the dead Algonquin, transfixed the head on a pike, and cast
+the mutilated body into the flames for those cannibal rites in which
+savages thought they gained courage by eating the flesh of their
+enemies.  Radisson was rifled of clothes and arms, trussed at the
+elbows, roped round the waist, and driven with blows back to the
+canoes.  There were other captives among the Mohawks.  As the canoes
+emerged from the islands, Radisson counted one hundred and fifty
+Iroquois warriors, with two French captives, one white woman, and
+seventeen Hurons.  Flaunting from the canoe prows were the scalps of
+eleven Algonquins.  The victors fired off their muskets and shouted
+defiance until the valley rang.  As the seventy-five canoes turned up
+the Richelieu River for the country of the Iroquois, hope died in the
+captive Hurons and there mingled with the chant of the Mohawks'
+war-songs, the low monotonous dirge of the prisoners:--
+
+  "If I die, I die valiant!
+  I go without fear
+  To that land where brave men
+  Have gone long before me--
+  If I die, I die valiant."
+
+Twelve miles up the Richelieu, the Iroquois landed to camp.  The
+prisoners were pegged out on the sand, elbows trussed to knees, each
+captive tied to a post.  In this fashion they lay every night of
+encampment, tortured by sand-flies that they were powerless to drive
+off.  At the entrance to the Mohawk village, a yoke was fastened to the
+captives' necks by placing pairs of saplings one on each side down the
+line of prisoners.  By the rope round the waist of the foremost
+prisoner, they were led slowly between the lines of tormentors.  The
+captives were ordered to sing.  If one refused or showed fear, a Mohawk
+struck off a finger with a hatchet, or tore the prisoners' nails out,
+or thrust red-hot irons into the muscles of the bound arms.[10]  As
+Radisson appeared, he was recognized with shouts of rage by the friends
+of the murdered Mohawks.  Men, women, and children armed with rods and
+skull-crackers--leather bags loaded with stones--rushed on the slowly
+moving file of prisoners.
+
+"They began to cry from both sides," says Radisson; "we marching one
+after another, environed with people to witness that hideous sight,
+which seriously may be called the image of Hell in this world."
+
+The prisoners moved mournfully on.  The Hurons chanted their death
+dirge.  The Mohawk women uttered screams of mockery.  Suddenly there
+broke from the throng of onlookers the Iroquois family that had adopted
+Radisson.  Pushing through the crew of torturers, the mother caught
+Radisson by the hair, calling him by the name of her dead son, "Orimha!
+Orimha!"  She cut the thongs that bound him to the poles, and wresting
+him free shoved him to her husband, who led Radisson to their own lodge.
+
+"Thou fool," cried the old chief, "thou wast my son!  Thou makest
+thyself an enemy!  Thou lovest us not, though we saved thy life!
+Wouldst kill me, too?"  Then, with a rough push to a mat on the ground,
+"Chagon--now, be merry!  It's a merry business you've got into!  Give
+him something to eat!"
+
+Trembling with fear, young Radisson put as bold a face on as he could
+and made a show of eating what the squaw placed before him.  He was
+still relating his adventures when there came a roar of anger from the
+Mohawks outside, who had discovered his absence from the line.  A
+moment later the rabble broke into the lodge.  Jostling the friendly
+chief aside, the Mohawk warriors carried Radisson back to the orgies of
+the torture.  The prisoners had been taken out of the stocks and placed
+on several scaffoldings.  One poor Frenchman fell to the ground bruised
+and unable to rise.  The Iroquois tore the scalp from his head and
+threw him into the fire.  That was Radisson's first glimpse of what was
+in store for him.  Then he, too, stood on the scaffolding among the
+other prisoners, who never ceased singing their death song.  In the
+midst of these horrors--_diableries_, the Jesuits called them--as if
+the very elements had been moved with pity, there burst over the
+darkened forest a terrific hurricane of hail and rain.  This put out
+the fires and drove all the tormentors away but a few impish children,
+who stayed to pluck nails from the hands and feet of the captives and
+shoot arrows with barbed points at the naked bodies.  Every iniquity
+that cruelty could invent, these children practised on the captives.
+Red-hot spears were brought from the lodge fires and thrust into the
+prisoners.  The mutilated finger ends were ground between stones.
+Thongs were twisted round wrists and ankles, by sticks put through a
+loop, till flesh was cut to the bone.  As the rain ceased falling, a
+woman, who was probably the wife of one of the murdered Mohawks,
+brought her little boy to cut one of Radisson's fingers with a flint
+stone.  The child was too young and ran away from the gruesome task.
+
+Gathering darkness fell over the horrible spectacle.  The exhausted
+captives, some in a delirium from pain, others unconscious, were led to
+separate lodges, or dragged over the ground, and left tied for the
+night.  The next morning all were returned to the scaffolds, but the
+first day had glutted the Iroquois appetite for tortures.  The friendly
+family was permitted to approach Radisson.  The mother brought him food
+and told him that the Council Lodge had decided not to kill him for
+that day--they wanted the young white warrior for their own ranks; but
+even as the cheering hope was uttered, came a brave with a pipe of live
+coals, in which he thrust and held Radisson's thumb.  No sooner had the
+tormentor left than the woman bound up the burn and oiled Radisson's
+wounds.  He suffered no abuse that day till night, when the soles of
+both feet were burned.  The majority of the captives were flung into a
+great bonfire.  On the third day of torture he almost lost his life.
+First came a child to gnaw at his fingers.  Then a man appeared armed
+for the ghastly work of mutilation.  Both these the Iroquois father of
+Radisson sent away.  Once, when none of the friendly family happened to
+be near, Radisson was seized and bound for burning, but by chance the
+lighted faggot scorched his executioner.  A friendly hand slashed the
+thongs that bound him, and he was drawn back to the scaffold.
+
+Past caring whether he lived or died, and in too great agony from the
+burns of his feet to realize where he was going, Radisson was conducted
+to the Great Council.  Sixty old men sat on a circle of mats, smoking,
+round the central fire.  Before them stood seven other captives.
+Radisson only was still bound.  A gust of wind from the opening lodge
+door cleared the smoke for an instant and there entered Radisson's
+Indian father, clad in the regalia of a mighty chief.  Tomahawk and
+calumet and medicine-bag were in his hands.  He took his place in the
+circle of councillors.  Judgment was to be given on the remaining
+prisoners.
+
+After passing the Council Pipe from hand to hand in solemn silence, the
+sachems prepared to give their views.  One arose, and offering the
+smoke of incense to the four winds of heaven to invoke witness to the
+justice of the trial, gave his opinion on the matter of life or death.
+Each of the chiefs in succession spoke.  Without any warning whatever,
+one chief rose and summarily tomahawked three of the captives.  That
+had been the sentence.  The rest were driven, like sheep for the
+shambles, to life-long slavery.
+
+Radisson was left last.  His case was important.  He had sanctioned the
+murder of three Mohawks.  Not for a moment since he was recaptured had
+they dared to untie the hands of so dangerous a prisoner.  Amid deathly
+silence, the Iroquois father stood up.  Flinging down medicine-bag, fur
+robe, wampum belts, and tomahawk, he pointed to the nineteen scars upon
+his side, each of which signified an enemy slain by his own hand.  Then
+the old Mohawk broke into one of those impassioned rhapsodies of
+eloquence which delighted the savage nature, calling back to each of
+the warriors recollection of victories for the Iroquois.  His eyes took
+fire from memory of heroic battle.  The councillors shook off their
+imperturbable gravity and shouted "Ho, ho!"  Each man of them had a
+memory of his part in those past glories.  And as they applauded, there
+glided into the wigwam the mother, singing some battle-song of valor,
+dancing and gesticulating round and round the lodge in dizzy,
+serpentine circlings, that illustrated in pantomime those battles of
+long ago.  Gliding ghostily from the camp-fire to the outer dark, she
+suddenly stopped, stood erect, advanced a step, and with all her might
+threw one belt of priceless wampum at the councillors' feet, one
+necklace over the prisoner's head.
+
+Before the applause could cease or the councillors' ardor cool, the
+adopted brother sprang up, hatchet in hand, and sang of other
+victories.  Then, with a delicacy of etiquette which white pleaders do
+not always observe, father and son withdrew from the Council Lodge to
+let the jury deliberate.  The old sachems were disturbed.  They had
+been moved more than their wont.  Twenty withdrew to confer.  Dusk
+gathered deeper and deeper over the forests of the Mohawk Valley.
+Tawny faces came peering at the doors, waiting for the decision.
+Outsiders tore the skins from the walls of the lodge that they, too,
+might witness the memorable trial of the boy prisoner.  Sachem after
+sachem rose and spoke.  Tobacco was sacrificed to the fire-god.  Would
+the relatives of the dead Mohawks consider the wampum belts full
+compensation?  Could the Iroquois suffer a youth to live who had joined
+the murderers of the Mohawks?  Could the Mohawks afford to offend the
+great Iroquois chief who was the French youth's friend?  As they
+deliberated, the other councillors returned, accompanied by all the
+members of Radisson's friendly family.  Again the father sang and
+spoke.  This time when he finished, instead of sitting down, he caught
+the necklace of wampum from Radisson's neck, threw it at the feet of
+the oldest sachem, cut the captive's bonds, and, amid shouts of
+applause, set the white youth free.
+
+
+One of the incomprehensible things to civilization is how a white man
+_can_ degenerate to savagery.  Young Radisson's life is an
+illustration.  In the first transports of his freedom, with the Mohawk
+women dancing and singing around him, the men shouting, he leaped up,
+oblivious of pain; but when the flush of ecstasy had passed, he sank to
+the mat of the Iroquois lodge, and he was unable to use his burned feet
+for more than a month.  During this time the Iroquois dressed his
+wounds, brought him the choice portions of the hunt, gave him clean
+clothing purchased at Orange (Albany), and attended to his wants as if
+he had been a prince.  No doubt the bright eyes of the swarthy young
+French boy moved to pity the hearts of the Mohawk mothers, and his
+courage had won him favor among the warriors.  He was treated like a
+king.  The women waited upon him like slaves, and the men gave him
+presents of firearms and ammunition--the Indian's most precious
+possessions.  Between flattered vanity and indolence, other white men,
+similarly treated, have lost their self-respect.  Beckworth, of the
+Missouri, became to all intents and purposes a savage; and Bird, of the
+Blackfeet, degenerated lower than the Indians.  Other Frenchmen
+captured from the St. Lawrence, and white women taken from the New
+England colonies, became so enamored of savage life that they refused
+to leave the Indian lodges when peace had liberated them.  Not so
+Radisson.  Though only seventeen, flattered vanity never caused him to
+forget the gratitude he owed the Mohawk family.  Though he relates his
+life with a frankness that leaves nothing untold, he never at any time
+returned treachery for kindness.  The very chivalry of the French
+nature endangered him all the more.  Would he forget his manhood, his
+birthright of a superior race, his inheritance of nobility from a
+family that stood foremost among the _noblesse_ of New France?
+
+[Illustration: Albany, from an Old Print.]
+
+
+The spring of 1653 came with unloosening of the rivers and stirring of
+the forest sap and fret of the warrior blood.  Radisson's Iroquois
+father held great feasts in which he heaved up the hatchet to break the
+kettle of sagamite against all enemies.  Would Radisson go on the
+war-path with the braves, or stay at home with the women and so lose
+the respect of the tribe?  In the hope of coming again within reach of
+Three Rivers, he offered to join the Iroquois in their wars.  The
+Mohawks were delighted with his spirit, but they feared to lose their
+young warrior.  Accepting his offer, they refused to let him accompany
+them to Quebec, but assigned him to a band of young braves, who were to
+raid the border-lands between the Huron country of the Upper Lakes and
+the St. Lawrence.  This was not what Radisson wanted, but he could not
+draw back.  There followed months of wild wanderings round the regions
+of Niagara.  The band of young braves passed dangerous places with
+great precipices and a waterfall, where the river was a mile wide and
+unfrozen.  Radisson was constrained to witness many acts against the
+Eries, which must have one of two effects on white blood,--either turn
+the white man into a complete savage, or disgust him utterly with
+savage life.  Leaving the Mohawk village amid a blare of guns and
+shouts, the young braves on their maiden venture passed successively
+through the lodges of Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas, where
+they were feasted almost to death by the Iroquois Confederacy.[11]
+Then they marched to the vast wilderness of snow-padded forests and
+heaped windfall between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
+
+Snow still lay in great drifts under the shadow of hemlock and spruce;
+and the braves skimmed forward winged with the noiseless speed of
+snow-shoes.  When the snow became too soft from thaw for snow-shoes,
+they paused to build themselves a skiff.  It was too early to peel the
+bark off the birch, so they made themselves a dugout of the walnut
+tree.  The wind changed from north to south, clearing the lakes of ice
+and filling the air with the earthy smells of up-bursting growth.
+"There was such a thawing," writes Radisson, "ye little brookes flowed
+like rivers, which made us embark to wander over that sweet sea."
+Lounging in their skiff all day, carried from shore to shore with the
+waves, and sleeping round camp-fires on the sand each night, the young
+braves luxuriated in all the delights of sunny idleness and spring
+life.  But this was not war.  It was play, and play of the sort that
+weans the white man from civilization to savagery.
+
+One day a scout, who had climbed to the top of a tree, espied two
+strange squaws.  They were of a hostile tribe.  The Mohawk bloodthirst
+was up as a wolf's at the sight of lambs.  In vain Radisson tried to
+save the women by warning the Iroquois that if there were women, there
+must be men, too, who would exact vengeance for the squaws' death.  The
+young braves only laid their plans the more carefully for his warning
+and massacred the entire encampment.  Prisoners were taken, but when
+food became scarce they were brutally knocked on the head.  These
+tribes had never heard guns before, and at the sound of shots fled as
+from diabolical enemies.  It was an easy matter for the young braves in
+the course of a few weeks to take a score of scalps and a dozen
+prisoners.  At one place more than two hundred beaver were trapped.  At
+the end of the raid, the booty was equally divided.  Radisson asked
+that the woman prisoner be given to him; and he saved her from torture
+and death on the return to the Mohawks by presenting her as a slave to
+his Indian mother.  All his other share of booty he gave to the
+friendly family.  The raid was over.  He had failed of his main object
+in joining it.  He had not escaped.  But he had made one important
+gain.  His valor had re�stablished the confidence of the Indians so
+that when they went on a free-booting expedition against the whites of
+the Dutch settlements at Orange (Albany), Radisson was taken with them.
+Orange, or Albany, consisted at that time of some fifty thatched
+log-houses surrounded by a settlement of perhaps a hundred and fifty
+farmers.  This raid was bloodless.  The warriors looted the farmers'
+cabins, emptied their cupboards, and drank their beer cellars dry to
+the last drop.  Once more Radisson kept his head.  While the braves
+entered Fort Orange roaring drunk, Radisson was alert and sober.  A
+drunk Indian falls an easy prey in the bartering of pelts.  The
+Iroquois wanted guns.  The Dutch wanted pelts.  The whites treated the
+savages like kings; and the Mohawks marched from house to house
+feasting of the best.  Radisson was dressed in garnished buckskin and
+had been painted like a Mohawk.  Suspecting some design to escape, his
+Iroquois friends never left him.  The young Frenchman now saw white men
+for the first time in almost two years; but the speech that he heard
+was in a strange tongue.  As Radisson went into the fort, he noticed a
+soldier among the Dutch.  At the same instant the soldier recognized
+him as a Frenchman, and oblivious of the Mohawks' presence blurted out
+his discovery in Iroquois dialect, vowing that for all the paint and
+grease, this youth was a white man below.  The fellow's blundering
+might have cost Radisson's life; but the youth had not been a captive
+among crafty Mohawks for nothing.  Radisson feigned surprise at the
+accusation.  That quieted the Mohawk suspicions and they were presently
+deep in the beer pots of the Dutch.  Again the soldier spoke, this time
+in French.  It was the first time that Radisson had heard his native
+tongue for months.  He answered in French.  At that the soldier emitted
+shouts of delight, for he, too, was French, and these strangers in an
+alien land threw their arms about each other like a pair of long-lost
+brothers with exclamations of joy too great for words.
+
+[Illustration: The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time.]
+
+From that moment Radisson became the lion of Fort Orange.  The women
+dragged him to their houses and forced more dainties on him than he
+could eat.  He was conducted from house to house in triumph, to the
+amazed delight of the Indians.  The Dutch offered to ransom him at any
+price; but that would have exposed the Dutch settlement to the
+resentment of the Mohawks and placed Radisson under heavy obligation to
+people who were the enemies of New France.  Besides, his honor was
+pledged to return to his Indian parents; and it was a long way home to
+have to sail to Europe and back again to Quebec.  Perhaps, too, there
+was deep in his heart what he did not realize--a rooted love for the
+wilds that was to follow him all through life.  By the devious course
+of captivity, he had tasted of a new freedom and could not give it up.
+He declined the offer of the Dutch.  In two days he was back among the
+Mohawks ten times more a hero than he had ever been.  Mother and
+sisters were his slaves.
+
+But between love of the wilds and love of barbarism is a wide
+difference.  He had not been back for two weeks when that glimpse of
+crude civilization at Orange recalled torturing memories of the French
+home in Three Rivers.  The filthy food, the smoky lodges, the cruelties
+of the Mohawks, filled him with loathing.  The nature of the white man,
+which had been hidden under the grease and paint of the savage--and in
+danger of total eclipse--now came upper-most.  With Radisson, to think
+was to act.  He determined to escape if it cost him his life.
+
+Taking only a hatchet as if he were going to cut wood, Radisson left
+the Indian lodge early one morning in the fall of 1653.  Once out of
+sight from the village, he broke into a run, following the trail
+through the dense forests of the Mohawk Valley toward Fort Orange.  On
+and on he ran, all that day, without pause to rest or eat, without
+backward glance, with eye ever piercing through the long leafy vistas
+of the forest on the watch for the fresh-chipped bark of the trees that
+guided his course, or the narrow indurated path over the spongy mould
+worn by running warriors.  And when night filled the forest with the
+hoot of owl, and the far, weird cries of wild creatures on the rove,
+there sped through the aisled columns of star light and shadow, the
+ghostly figure of the French boy slim, and lithe as a willow, with
+muscles tense as ironwood, and step silent as the mountain-cat.  All
+that night he ran without a single stop.  Chill daybreak found him
+still staggering on, over rocks slippery with the night frost, over
+windfall tree on tree in a barricade, through brawling mountain brooks
+where his moccasins broke the skim of ice at the edge, past rivers
+where he half waded, half swam.  He was now faint from want of food;
+but fear spurred him on.  The morning air was so cold that he found it
+better to run than rest.  By four of the afternoon he came to a
+clearing in the forest, where was the cabin of a settler.  A man was
+chopping wood.  Radisson ascertained that there were no Iroquois in the
+cabin, and, hiding in it, persuaded the settler to carry a message to
+Fort Orange, two miles farther on.  While he waited Indians passed the
+cabin, singing and shouting.  The settler's wife concealed him behind
+sacks of wheat and put out all lights.  Within an hour came a rescue
+party from Orange, who conducted him safely to the fort.  For three
+days Radisson hid in Orange, while the Mohawks wandered through the
+fort, calling him by name.
+
+Gifts of money from the Jesuit, Poncet, and from a Dutch merchant,
+enabled Radisson to take ship from Orange to New York, and from New
+York to Europe.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in
+Holland.  This view of Fort Amsterdam on the Manhattan is copied from
+an ancient engraving executed in Holland.  The fort was erected in 1623
+but finished upon the above model by Governor Van Twiller in 1635.]
+
+P�re Poncet had been captured by the Mohawks the preceding summer, but
+had escaped to Orange.[12]  Embarking on a small sloop, Radisson sailed
+down the Hudson to New York, which then consisted of some five hundred
+houses, with stores, barracks, a stone church, and a dilapidated fort.
+Central Park was a forest; goats and cows pastured on what is now Wall
+Street; and to east and west was a howling wilderness of marsh and
+woods.  After a stay of three weeks, Radisson embarked for Amsterdam,
+which he reached in January, 1654.
+
+
+[1] Benjamin Sulte in _Chronique Trifluvienne_.
+
+[2] It was in August of this same year, 1652, that the governor of
+Three Rivers was slain by the Iroquois.  Parkman gives this date, 1653,
+Garneau, 1651, L'Abb� Tanguay, 1651; Dollier de Casson, 1651, Belmont,
+1653.  Sulte gives the name of the governor Duplessis-Kerbodot, not
+Bochart, as given in Parkman.
+
+[3] Dr. Bryce has unearthed the fact that in a petition to the House of
+Commons, 1698, Radisson sets down his age as sixty-two.  This gives the
+year of his birth as 1636.  On the other hand, Sulte has record of a
+Pierre Radisson registered at Quebec in 1681, aged fifty-one, which
+would make him slightly older, if it is the same Radisson.  Mr. Sulte's
+explanation is as follows: S�bastien Hayet of St. Malo married Madeline
+H�nault.  Their daughter Marguerite married Chouart, known as
+Groseillers.  Madeline H�nault then married Pierre Esprit Radisson of
+Paris, whose children were Pierre, our hero, and two daughters.
+
+[4] A despatch from M. Talon in 1666 shows there were 461 families in
+Three Rivers.  State papers from the Minister to M. Frontenac in 1674
+show there were only 6705 French in all the colony.  Averaging five a
+family, there must have been 2000 people at Three Rivers.  Fear of the
+Iroquois must have driven the country people inside the fort, so that
+the population enrolled was larger than the real population of Three
+Rivers.  Sulte gives the normal population of Three Rivers in 1654 as
+38 married couples, 13 bachelors, 38 boys, 26 girls--in all not 200.
+
+[5] At first flush, this seems a slip in _Radisson's Relation_.  Where
+did the Mohawks get their guns?  _New York Colonial Documents_ show
+that between 1640 and 1650 the Dutch at Fort Orange had supplied the
+Mohawks alone with four hundred guns.
+
+[6] One of many instances of Radisson's accuracy in detail.  All tribes
+have a trick of browning food on hot stones or sand that has been taken
+from fire.  The Assiniboines gained their name from this practice: they
+were the users of "boiling stones."
+
+[7] I have asked both natives and old fur-traders what combination of
+sounds in English most closely resembles the Indian war-cry, and they
+have all given the words that I have quoted.  One daughter of a chief
+factor, who went through a six weeks' siege by hostiles in her father's
+fort, gave a still more graphic description.  She said: "you can
+imagine the snarls of a pack of furiously vicious dogs saying 'ah-oh'
+with a whoop, you have it; and you will not forget it!"
+
+[8] This practice was a binding law on many tribes.  Catlin relates it
+of the Mandans, and Hearne of the Chipewyans.  The latter considered it
+a crime to kiss wives and children after a massacre without the bath of
+purification.  Could one know where and when that universal custom of
+washing blood-guilt arose, one mystery of existence would be unlocked.
+
+[9] I have throughout followed Mr. Sulte's correction of the name of
+this governor.  The mistake followed by Parkman, Tanguay, and
+others--it seems--was first made in 1820, and has been faithfully
+copied since.  Elsewhere will be found Mr. Sulte's complete elucidation
+of the hopeless dark in which all writers have involved Radisson's
+family.
+
+[10] If there were not corroborative testimony, one might suspect the
+excited French lad of gross exaggeration in his account of Iroquois
+tortures; but the Jesuits more than confirm the worst that Radisson
+relates.  Bad as these torments were, they were equalled by the deeds
+of white troops from civilized cities in the nineteenth century.  A
+band of Montana scouts came on the body of a comrade horribly mutilated
+by the Indians.  They caught the culprits a few days afterwards.
+Though the government report has no account of what happened, traders
+say the bodies of the guilty Indians were found skinned and scalped by
+the white troops.
+
+[11] Radisson puts the Senecas before the Cayugas, which is different
+from the order given by the Jesuits.
+
+[12] The fact that Radisson confessed his sins to this priest seems
+pretty well to prove that Pierre was a Catholic and not a Protestant,
+as has been so often stated.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+1657-1658
+
+RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE
+
+Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the
+Iroquois Mission--He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the
+Thousand Islands--Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as
+Prisoners of War--Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson.
+
+
+From Amsterdam Radisson took ship to Rochelle.  Here he found himself a
+stranger in his native land.  All his kin of whom there is any
+record--Pierre Radisson, his father, Madeline H�nault, his mother,
+Marguerite and Fran�oise, his elder and younger sisters, his uncle and
+aunt, with their daughter, Elizabeth--were now living at Three Rivers
+in New France.[1]  Embarking with the fishing fleet that yearly left
+France for the Grand Banks, Radisson came early in the spring of 1654
+to Isle Perc�e at the mouth of the St. Lawrence.  He was still a week's
+journey from Three Rivers, but chance befriended him.  Algonquin canoes
+were on the way up the river to war on the Iroquois.  Joining the
+Indian canoes, he slipped past the hilly shores of the St. Lawrence and
+in five days was between the main bank on the north side and the muddy
+shallows of the Isle of Orleans.  Sheering out where the Montmorency
+roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across
+St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below
+the beetling heights of Cape Diamond, Quebec.
+
+[Illustration: One of the earliest maps of the Great Lakes.]
+
+It was May, 1651, when he had first seen the turrets and spires of
+Quebec glittering on the hillside in the sun; it was May, 1652, that
+the Iroquois had carried him off from Three Rivers; and it was May,
+1654, when he came again to his own.  He was welcomed back as from the
+dead.  Changes had taken place in the interval of his captivity.  A
+truce had been arranged between the Iroquois and the French.  Now that
+the Huron missions had been wiped out by Iroquois wars, the Jesuits
+regarded the truce as a Divine provision for a mission among the
+Iroquois.  The year that Radisson escaped from the Mohawks, Jesuit
+priests had gone among them.  A still greater change that was to affect
+his life more vitally had taken place in the Radisson family.  The year
+that Radisson had been captured, the outraged people of Three Rivers
+had seized a Mohawk chief and burned him to death.  In revenge, the
+Mohawks murdered the governor of Three Rivers and a company of
+Frenchmen.  Among the slain was the husband of Radisson's sister,
+Marguerite.  When Radisson returned, he found that his widowed sister
+had married M�dard Chouart Groseillers, a famous fur trader of New
+France, who had passed his youth as a lay helper to the Jesuit missions
+of Lake Huron.[2]  Radisson was now doubly bound to the Jesuits by
+gratitude and family ties.  Never did pagan heart hear an evangel more
+gladly than the Mohawks heard the Jesuits.  The priests were welcomed
+with acclaim, led to the Council Lodge, and presented with belts of
+wampum.  Not a suspicion of foul play seems to have entered the
+Jesuits' mind.  When the Iroquois proposed to incorporate into the
+Confederacy the remnants of the Hurons, the Jesuits discerned nothing
+in the plan but the most excellent means to convert pagan Iroquois by
+Christian Hurons.  Having gained an inch, the Iroquois demanded the
+proverbial ell.  They asked that a French settlement be made in the
+Iroquois country.  The Indians wanted a supply of firearms to war
+against all enemies; and with a French settlement miles away from help,
+the Iroquois could wage what war they pleased against the Algonquins
+without fear of reprisals from Quebec--the settlement of white men
+among hostiles would be hostage of generous treatment from New France.
+Of these designs, neither priests nor governor had the slightest
+suspicion.  The Jesuits were thinking only of the Iroquois' soul; the
+French, of peace with the Iroquois at any cost.
+
+In 1656 Major Dupuis and fifty Frenchmen had established a French
+colony among the Iroquois.[3]  The hardships of these pioneers form no
+part of Radisson's life, and are, therefore, not set down here.  Peace
+not bought by a victory is an unstable foundation for Indian treaty.
+The Mohawks were jealous that their confederates, the Onondagas, had
+obtained the French settlement.  In 1657, eighty Iroquois came to
+Quebec to escort one hundred Huron refugees back to Onondaga for
+adoption into the Confederacy.  These Hurons were Christians, and the
+two Jesuits, Paul Ragueneau and Fran�ois du P�ron, were appointed to
+accompany them to their new abode.  Twenty young Frenchmen joined the
+party to seek their fortunes at the new settlement; but a man was
+needed who could speak Iroquois.  Glad to repay his debt to the
+Jesuits, young Radisson volunteered to go as a _donn�_, that is, a lay
+helper vowed to gratuitous services.
+
+It was midsummer before all preparations had been made.  On July 26,
+the party of two hundred, made up of twenty Frenchmen, eighty Iroquois,
+and a hundred Hurons, filed out of the gates of Montreal, and winding
+round the foot of the mountain followed a trail through the forest that
+took them past the Lachine Rapids.  The Onondaga _voyageurs_ carried
+the long birch canoes inverted on their shoulders, two Indians at each
+end; and the other Iroquois trotted over the rocks with the Frenchmen's
+baggage on their backs.  The day was hot, the _portage_ long and
+slippery with dank moisture.  The Huron children fagged and fell
+behind.  At nightfall, thirty of the haughty Iroquois lost patience,
+and throwing down their bundles made off for Quebec with the avowed
+purpose of raiding the Algonquins.  On the way, they paused to scalp
+three Frenchmen at Montreal, cynically explaining that if the French
+persisted in taking Algonquins into their arms, the white men need not
+be surprised if the blow aimed at an Algonquin sometimes struck a
+Frenchman.  That act opened the eyes of the French to the real meaning
+of the peace made with the Iroquois; but the little colony was beyond
+recall.  To insure the safety of the French among the Onondagas, the
+French governor at Quebec seized a dozen Iroquois and kept them as
+hostages of good conduct.
+
+Meanwhile, all was confusion on Lake St. Louis, where the last band of
+colonists had encamped.  The Iroquois had cast the Frenchmen's baggage
+on the rocks and refused to carry it farther.  Leaving the whites all
+embarrassed, the Onondagas hurriedly embarked the Hurons and paddled
+quickly out of sight.  The act was too suddenly unanimous not to have
+been premeditated.  Why had the Iroquois carried the Hurons away from
+the Frenchmen?  Father Ragueneau at once suspected some sinister
+purpose.  Taking only a single sack of flour for food, he called for
+volunteers among the twenty Frenchmen to embark in a leaky, old canoe
+and follow the treacherous Onondagas.  Young Radisson was one of the
+first to offer himself.  Six others followed his example; and the seven
+Frenchmen led by the priest struck across the lake, leaving the others
+to gather up the scattered baggage.
+
+The Onondagas were too deep to reveal their plots with seven armed
+Frenchmen in pursuit.  The Indians permitted the French boats to come
+up with the main band.  All camped together in the most friendly
+fashion that night; but the next morning one Iroquois offered passage
+in his canoe to one Frenchman, another Iroquois to another of the
+whites, and by the third day, when they came to Lake St. Francis, the
+old canoe had been abandoned.  The French were scattered promiscuously
+among the Iroquois, with no two whites in one boat.  The Hurons were
+quicker to read the signs of treachery than the French.  There were
+rumors of one hundred Mohawks lying in ambush at the Thousand Islands
+to massacre the coming Hurons.  On the morning of August 3 four Huron
+warriors and two women seized a canoe, and to the great astonishment of
+the encampment launched out before they could be stopped.  Heading the
+canoe back for Montreal, they broke out in a war chant of defiance to
+the Iroquois.
+
+The Onondagas made no sign, but they evidently took council to delay no
+longer.  Again, when they embarked, they allowed no two whites in one
+canoe.  The boats spread out.  Nothing was said to indicate anything
+unusual.  The lake lay like a silver mirror in the August sun.  The
+water was so clear that the Indians frequently paused to spear fish
+lying below on the stones.  At places the canoes skirted close to the
+wood-fringed shore, and braves landed to shoot wild-fowl.  Radisson and
+Ragueneau seemed simultaneously to have noticed the same thing.
+Without any signal, at about four in the afternoon, the Onondagas
+steered their canoes for a wooded island in the middle of the St.
+Lawrence.  With Radisson were three Iroquois and a Huron.  As the canoe
+grated shore, the bowman loaded his musket and sprang into the thicket.
+Naturally, the Huron turned to gaze after the disappearing hunter.
+Instantly, the Onondaga standing directly behind buried his hatchet in
+the Huron's head.  The victim fell quivering across Radisson's feet and
+was hacked to pieces by the other Iroquois.  Not far along the shore
+from Radisson, the priest was landing.  He noticed an Iroquois chief
+approach a Christian Huron girl.  If the Huron had not been a convert,
+she might have saved her life by becoming one of the chief's many
+slaves; but she had repulsed the Onondaga pagan.  As Ragueneau looked,
+the girl fell dead with her skull split by the chief's war-axe.  The
+Hurons on the lake now knew what awaited them; and a cry of terror
+arose from the children.  Then a silence of numb horror settled over
+the incoming canoes.  The women were driven ashore like lambs before
+wolves; but the valiant Hurons would not die without striking one blow
+at their inveterate and treacherous enemies.  They threw themselves
+together back to back, prepared to fight.  For a moment this show of
+resistance drove off the Iroquois.  Then the Onondaga chieftain rushed
+forward, protesting that the two murders had been a personal quarrel.
+Striking back his own warriors with a great show of sincerity, he bade
+the Hurons run for refuge to the top of the hill.  No sooner had the
+Hurons broken rank, than there rushed from the woods scores of
+Iroquois, daubed in war-paint and shouting their war-cry.  This was the
+hunt to which the young braves had dashed from the canoes to be in
+readiness behind the thicket.  Before the scattered Hurons could get
+together for defence, the Onondagas had closed around the hilltop in a
+cordon.  The priest ran here, there, everywhere,--comforting the dying,
+stopping mutilation, defending the women.  All the Hurons were
+massacred but one man, and the bodies were thrown into the river.  With
+blankets drawn over their heads that they might not see, the women
+huddled together, dumb with terror.  When the Onondagas turned toward
+the women, the Frenchmen stood with muskets levelled.  The Onondagas
+halted, conferred, and drew off.
+
+[Illustration: Paddling past Hostiles.]
+
+The fight lasted for four hours.  Darkness and the valor of the little
+French band saved the women for the time.  The Iroquois kindled a fire
+and gathered to celebrate their victory.  Then the old priest took his
+life in his hands.  Borrowing three belts of wampum, he left the
+huddling group of Huron women and Frenchmen and marched boldly into the
+circle of hostiles.  The lives of all the French and Hurons hung by a
+thread.  Ragueneau had been the spiritual guide of the murdered tribe
+for twenty years; and he was now sobbing like a child.  The Iroquois
+regarded his grief with sardonic scorn; but they misjudged the manhood
+below the old priest's tears.  Ragueneau asked leave to speak.  They
+grunted permission.  Springing up, he broke into impassioned, fearless
+reproaches of the Iroquois for their treachery.  Casting one belt of
+wampum at the Onondaga chief's feet, the priest demanded pledges that
+the massacre cease.  A second belt was given to register the Onondaga's
+vow to conduct the women and children safely to the Iroquois country.
+The third belt was for the safety of the French at Onondaga.
+
+The Iroquois were astonished.  They had looked for womanish pleadings.
+They had heard stern demands coupled with fearless threats of
+punishment.  When Ragueneau sat down, the Onondaga chief bestirred
+himself to counteract the priest's powerful impression.  Lounging to
+his feet, the Onondaga impudently declared that the governor of Quebec
+had instigated the massacre.  Ragueneau leaped up with a denial that
+took the lie from the scoundrel's teeth.  The chief sat down abashed.
+The Council grunted "Ho, ho!" accepting the wampum and promising all
+that the Jesuit had asked.
+
+
+Among the Thousand Islands, the French who had remained behind to
+gather up the baggage again joined the Onondagas.  They brought with
+them from the Isle of Massacres a poor Huron woman, whom they had found
+lying insensible on a rock.  During the massacre she had hidden in a
+hollow tree, where she remained for three days.  In this region,
+Radisson almost lost his life by hoisting a blanket sail to his canoe.
+The wind drifted the boat so far out that Radisson had to throw all
+ballast overboard to keep from being swamped.  As they turned from the
+St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario up the Oswego River for Onondaga, they
+met other warriors of the Iroquois nation.  In spite of pledges to the
+priest, the meeting was celebrated by torturing the Huron women to
+entertain the newcomers.  Not the sufferings of the early Christians in
+Rome exceeded the martyrdom of the Christian Hurons among the
+Onondagas.  As her mother mounted the scaffold of tortures, a little
+girl who had been educated by the Ursulines of Quebec broke out with
+loud weeping.  The Huron mother turned calmly to the child:--
+
+"Weep not my death, my little daughter!  We shall this day be in
+heaven," said she; "God will pity us to all eternity.  The Iroquois
+cannot rob us of that."
+
+As the flames crept about her, her voice was heard chanting in the
+crooning monotone of Indian death dirge: "Jesu--have pity on us!
+Jesu--have pity on us!"  The next moment the child was thrown into the
+flames, repeating the same words.
+
+The Iroquois recognized Radisson.  He sent presents to his Mohawk
+parents, who afterwards played an important part in saving the French
+of Onondaga.  Having passed the falls, they came to the French fort
+situated on the crest of a hill above a lake.  Two high towers
+loopholed for musketry occupied the centre of the courtyard.  Double
+walls, trenched between, ran round a space large enough to enable the
+French to keep their cattle inside the fort.  The _voyageurs_ were
+welcomed to Onondaga by Major Dupuis, fifty Frenchmen, and several
+Jesuits.
+
+
+The pilgrims had scarcely settled at Onondaga before signs of the
+dangers that were gathering became too plain for the blind zeal of the
+Jesuits to ignore.  Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas, togged out in
+war-gear, swarmed outside the palisades.  There was no more dissembling
+of hunger for the Jesuits' evangel.  The warriors spoke no more soft
+words, but spent their time feasting, chanting war-songs, heaving up
+the war-hatchet against the kettle of sagamite--which meant the rupture
+of peace.  Then came four hundred Mohawks, who not only shouted their
+war-songs, but built their wigwams before the fort gates and
+established themselves for the winter like a besieging army.  That the
+intent of the entire Confederacy was hostile to Onondaga could not be
+mistaken; but what was holding the Indians back?  Why did they delay
+the massacre?  Then Huron slaves brought word to the besieged fort of
+the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec.  The fort understood what
+stayed the Iroquois blow.  The Confederacy dared not attack the
+isolated fort lest Quebec should take terrible vengeance on the
+hostages.
+
+[Illustration: Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, who was tortured by the
+Mohawks.  From a painting in Ch�teau de Ramezay, Montreal.]
+
+The French decided to send messengers to Quebec for instructions before
+closing navigation cut them off for the winter.  Thirteen men and one
+Jesuit left the fort the first week of September.  Mohawk spies knew of
+the departure and lay in ambush at each side of the narrow river to
+intercept the party; but the messengers eluded the trap by striking
+through the forests back from the river directly to the St. Lawrence.
+Then the little fort closed its gates and awaited an answer from
+Quebec.  Winter settled over the land, blocking the rivers with ice and
+the forest trails with drifts of snow; but no messengers came back from
+Quebec.  The Mohawks had missed the outgoing scouts: but they caught
+the return coureurs and destroyed the letters.  Not a soul could leave
+the fort but spies dogged his steps.  The Jesuits continued going from
+lodge to lodge, and in this way Onondaga gained vague knowledge of the
+plots outside the fort.  The French could venture out only at the risk
+of their lives, and spent the winter as closely confined as prisoners
+of war.  Of the ten drilled soldiers, nine threatened to desert.  One
+night an unseen hand plunged through the dark, seized the sentry, and
+dragged him from the gate.  The sentry drew his sword and shouted, "To
+arms!"  A band of Frenchmen sallied from the gates with swords and
+muskets.  In the tussle the sentry was rescued, and gifts were sent out
+in the morning to pacify the wounded Mohawks.  Fortunately the besieged
+had plenty of food inside the stockades; but the Iroquois knew there
+could be no escape till the ice broke up in spring, and were quite
+willing to exchange ample supplies of corn for tobacco and firearms.
+The Huron slaves who carried the corn to the fort acted as spies among
+the Mohawks for the French.
+
+In the month of February the vague rumors of conspiracy crystallized
+into terrible reality.  A dying Mohawk confessed to a Jesuit that the
+Iroquois[4] Council had determined to massacre half the company of
+French and to hold the other half till their own Mohawk hostages were
+released from Quebec.  Among the hostiles encamped before the gates was
+Radisson's Indian father.  This Mohawk was still an influential member
+of the Great Council.  He, too, reported that the warriors were bent on
+destroying Onondaga.[5]  What was to be done?  No answer had come from
+Quebec, and no aid could come till the spring.  The rivers were still
+blocked with ice; and there were not sufficient boats in the fort to
+carry fifty men down to Quebec.  "What could we do?" writes Radisson.
+"We were in their hands.  It was as hard to get away from them as for a
+ship in full sea without a pilot."
+
+They at once began constructing two large flat-bottomed boats of light
+enough draft to run the rapids in the flood-tide of spring.  Carpenters
+worked hidden in an attic; but when the timbers were mortised together,
+the boats had to be brought downstairs, where one of the Huron slaves
+caught a glimpse of them.  Boats of such a size he had never before
+seen.  Each was capable of carrying fifteen passengers with full
+complement of baggage.  Spring rains were falling in floods.  The
+convert Huron had heard the Jesuits tell of Noah's ark in the deluge.
+Returning to the Mohawks, he spread a terrifying report of an impending
+flood and of strange arks of refuge built by the white men.  Emissaries
+were appointed to visit the French fort; but the garrison had been
+forewarned.  Radisson knew of the coming spies from his Indian father;
+and the Jesuits had learned of the Council from their converts.  Before
+the spies arrived, the French had built a floor over their flatboats,
+and to cover the fresh floor had heaped up a dozen canoes.  The spies
+left the fort satisfied that neither a deluge nor an escape was
+impending.  Birch canoes would be crushed like egg-shells if they were
+run through the ice jams of spring floods.  Certain that their victims
+were trapped, the Iroquois were in no haste to assault a double-walled
+fort, where musketry could mow them down as they rushed the hilltop.
+The Indian is bravest under cover; so the Mohawks spread themselves in
+ambush on each side of the narrow river and placed guards at the falls
+where any boats must be _portaged_.
+
+Of what good were the boats?  To allay suspicion of escape, the Jesuits
+continued to visit the wigwams.[6]  The French were in despair.  They
+consulted Radisson, who could go among the Mohawks as with a charmed
+life, and who knew the customs of the Confederacy so well.  Radisson
+proposed a way to outwit the savages.  With this plan the priests had
+nothing to do.  To the harum-scarum Radisson belong the sole credit and
+discredit of the escapade.  On his device hung the lives of fifty
+innocent men.  These men must either escape or be massacred.  Of
+bloodshed, Radisson had already seen too much; and the youth of
+twenty-one now no more proposed to stickle over the means of victory
+than generals who wear the Victoria cross stop to stickle over means
+to-day.
+
+Radisson knew that the Indians had implicit faith in dreams; so
+Radisson had a dream.[7]  He realized as critics of Indian customs fail
+to understand that the fearful privations of savage life teach the
+crime of waste.  The Indian will eat the last morsel of food set before
+him if he dies for it.  He believes that the gods punish waste of food
+by famine.  The belief is a religious principle and the
+feasts--_festins � tout manger_--are a religious act; so Radisson
+dreamed--whether sleeping or waking--that the white men were to give a
+great festival to the Iroquois.  This dream he related to his Indian
+father.  The Indian like his white brother can clothe a vice under
+religious mantle.  The Iroquois were gluttonous on a religious
+principle.  Radisson's dream was greeted with joy.  _Coureurs_ ran
+through the forest, bidding the Mohawks to the feast.  Leaving ambush
+of forest and waterfall, the warriors hastened to the walls of
+Onondaga.  To whet their appetite, they were kept waiting outside for
+two whole days.  The French took turns in entertaining the waiting
+guests.  Boisterous games, songs, dances, and music kept the Iroquois
+awake and hilarious to the evening of the second day.  Inside the fort
+bedlam reigned.  Boats were dragged from floors to a sally-port at the
+rear of the courtyard.  Here firearms, ammunition, food, and baggage
+were placed in readiness.  Guns which could not be taken were burned or
+broken.  Ammunition was scattered in the snow.  All the stock but one
+solitary pig, a few chickens, and the dogs was sacrificed for the
+feast, and in the barracks a score of men were laboring over enormous
+kettles of meat.  Had an Indian spy climbed to the top of a tree and
+looked over the palisades, all would have been discovered; but the
+French entertainers outside kept their guests busy.
+
+[Illustration: Ch�teau de Ramezay, Montreal, for years the residence of
+the governor, and later the storehouse of the fur companies.]
+
+On the evening of the second day a great fire was kindled in the outer
+enclosure, between the two walls.  The trumpets blew a deafening blast.
+The Mohawks answered with a shout.  The French clapped their hands.
+The outer gates were thrown wide open, and in trooped several hundred
+Mohawk warriors, seating themselves in a circle round the fire.
+Another blare of trumpets, and twelve enormous kettles of mincemeat
+were carried round the circle of guests.  A Mohawk chief rose solemnly
+and gave his deities of earth, air, and fire profuse thanks for having
+brought such generous people as the French among the Iroquois.  Other
+chiefs arose and declaimed to their hearers that earth did not contain
+such hosts as the French.  Before they had finished speaking there came
+a second and a third and a fourth relay of kettles round the circle of
+feasters.  Not one Iroquois dared to refuse the food heaped before him.
+By the time the kettles of salted fowl and venison and bear had passed
+round the circle, each Indian was glancing furtively sideways to see if
+his neighbor could still eat.  He who was compelled to forsake the
+feast first was to become the butt of the company.  All the while the
+French kept up a din of drums and trumpets and flageolets, dancing and
+singing and shouting to drive off sleep.  The eyes of the gorging
+Indians began to roll.  Never had they attempted to demolish such a
+banquet.  Some shook their heads and drew back.  Others fell over in
+the dead sleep that results from long fasting and overfeeding and fresh
+air.  Radisson was everywhere, urging the Iroquois to "Cheer up! cheer
+up!  If sleep overcomes you, you must awake!  Beat the drum!  Blow the
+trumpet!  Cheer up!  Cheer up!"
+
+But the end of the repulsive scene was at hand.  By midnight the
+Indians had--in the language of the white man--"gone under the
+mahogany."  They lay sprawled on the ground in sodden sleep.  Perhaps,
+too, something had been dropped in the fleshpots to make their sleep
+the sounder.  Radisson does not say no, neither does the priest, and
+they two were the only whites present who have written of the
+episode.[8]  But the French would hardly have been human if they had
+not assured their own safety by drugging the feasters.  It was a common
+thing for the fur traders of a later period to prevent massacre and
+quell riot by administering a quietus to Indians with a few drops of
+laudanum.
+
+The French now retired to the inner court.  The main gate was bolted
+and chained.  Through the loophole of this gate ran a rope attached to
+a bell that was used to summon the sentry.  To this rope the
+mischievous Radisson tied the only remaining pig, so that when the
+Indians would pull the rope for admission, the noise of the disturbed
+pig would give the impression of a sentry's tramp-tramp on parade.
+Stuffed effigies of soldiers were then stuck about the barracks.  If a
+spy climbed up to look over the palisades, he would see Frenchmen still
+in the fort.  While Radisson was busy with these precautions to delay
+pursuit, the soldiers and priests, led by Major Dupuis, had broken open
+the sally-port, forced the boats through sideways, and launched out on
+the river.  Speaking in whispers, they stowed the baggage in the
+flat-boats, then brought out skiffs--dugouts to withstand the ice
+jam--for the rest of the company.  The night was raw and cold.  A skim
+of ice had formed on the margins of the river.  Through the pitchy
+darkness fell a sleet of rain and snow that washed out the footsteps of
+the fugitives.  The current of mid-river ran a noisy mill-race of ice
+and log drift; and the _voyageurs_ could not see one boat length ahead.
+
+To men living in savagery come temptations that can neither be measured
+nor judged by civilization.  To the French at Onondaga came such a
+temptation now.  Their priests were busy launching the boats.  The
+departing soldiers seemed simultaneously to have become conscious of a
+very black suggestion.  Cooped up against the outer wall in the dead
+sleep of torpid gluttony lay the leading warriors of the Iroquois
+nation.  Were these not the assassins of countless Frenchmen, the
+murderers of women, the torturers of children?  Had Providence not
+placed the treacherous Iroquois in the hands of fifty Frenchmen?  If
+these warriors were slain, it would be an easy matter to march to the
+villages of the Confederacy, kill the old men, and take prisoners the
+women.  New France would be forever free of her most deadly enemy.
+Like the Indians, the white men were trying to justify a wrong under
+pretence of good.  By chance, word of the conspiracy was carried to the
+Jesuits.  With all the authority of the church, the priests forbade the
+crime.  "Their answer was," relates Radisson, "that they were sent to
+instruct in the faith of Jesus Christ and not to destroy, and that the
+cross must be their sword."
+
+Locking the sally-port, the company--as the Jesuit father
+records--"shook the dust of Onondaga from their feet," launched out on
+the swift-flowing, dark river and escaped "as the children of Israel
+escaped by night from the land of Egypt."  They had not gone far
+through the darkness before the roar of waters told them of a cataract
+ahead.  They were four hours carrying baggage and boats over this
+_portage_.  Sleet beat upon their backs.  The rocks were slippery with
+glazed ice; and through the rotten, half-thawed snow, the men sank to
+mid-waist.  Navigation became worse on Lake Ontario; for the wind
+tossed the lake like a sea, and ice had whirled against the St.
+Lawrence in a jam.  On the St. Lawrence, they had to wait for the
+current to carry the ice out.  At places they cut a passage through the
+honeycombed ice with their hatchets, and again they were compelled to
+_portage_ over the ice.  The water was so high that the rapids were
+safely ridden by all the boats but one, which was shipwrecked, and
+three of the men were drowned.
+
+They had left Onondaga on the 20th of March, 1658.  On the evening of
+April 3d they came to Montreal, where they learned that New France had
+all winter suffered intolerable insolence from the Iroquois, lest
+punishment of the hostiles should endanger the French at Onondaga.  The
+fleeing colonists waited twelve days at Montreal for the ice to clear,
+and were again held back by a jam at Three Rivers; but on April 23 they
+moored safely under the heights of Quebec.
+
+_Coureurs_ from Onondaga brought word that the Mohawks had been
+deceived by the pig and the ringing bell and the effigies for more than
+a week.  Crowing came from the chicken yard, dogs bayed in their
+kennels, and when a Mohawk pulled the bell at the gate, he could hear
+the sentry's measured march.  At the end of seven days not a white man
+had come from the fort.  At first the Mohawks had thought the "black
+robes" were at prayers; but now suspicions of trickery flashed on the
+Iroquois.  Warriors climbed the palisades and found the fort empty.
+Two hundred Mohawks set out in pursuit; but the bad weather held them
+back.  And that was the way Radisson saved Onondaga.[9]
+
+
+[1] The uncle, Pierre Esprit Radisson, is the one with whom careless
+writers have confused the young hero, owing to identity of name.
+Madeline H�nault has been described as the explorer's first wife,
+notwithstanding genealogical impossibilities which make the explorer's
+daughter thirty-six years old before he was seventeen.  Even the
+infallible Tanguay trips on Radisson's genealogy.  I have before me the
+complete record of the family taken from the parish registers of Three
+Rivers and Quebec, by the indefatigable Mr. Sulte, whose explanation of
+the case is this: that Radisson's mother, Madeline H�nault, first
+married S�bastien Hayet, of St. Malo, to whom was born Marguerite about
+1630; that her second husband was Pierre Esprit Radisson of Paris, to
+whom were born our hero and the sisters Fran�oise and Elizabeth.
+
+[2] I have throughout referred to M�dard Chouart, Sieur des
+Groseillers, as simply "Groseillers," because that is the name
+referring to him most commonly used in the _State Papers_ and old
+histories.  He was from Charly-Saint-Cyr, near Meaux, and is supposed
+to have been born about 1621.  His first wife was Helen Martin,
+daughter of Abraham Martin, who gave his name to the Plains of Abraham.
+
+[3] This is the story of Onondaga which Parkman has told.
+Unfortunately, when Parkman's account was written, _Radisson's
+Journals_ were unknown and Mr. Parkman had to rely entirely on the
+_Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_ and the _Jesuit Relations_.  After
+the discovery of _Radisson's Journals_, Parkman added a footnote to his
+account of Onondaga, _quoting_ Radisson in confirmation.  If Radisson
+may be quoted to corroborate Parkman, Radisson may surely be accepted
+as authentic.  At the same time, I have compared this journal with
+Father Ragueneau's of the same party, and the two tally in every detail.
+
+[4] See _Jesuit Relations_, 1657-1658.
+
+[5] _Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_.
+
+[6] See Ragueneau's account.
+
+[7] See _Marie de l'Incarnation_ and Dr. Dionne's modern monograph.
+
+[8] This account is drawn mainly from _Radisson's Journal_, partly from
+Father Ragueneau, and in one detail from a letter of _Marie de
+l'Incarnation_.  Garneau says the feasters were drugged, but I cannot
+find his authority for this, though from my knowledge of fur traders'
+escapes, I fancy it would hardly have been human nature not to add a
+sleeping potion to the kettles.
+
+[9] The _festins � tout manger_ must not be too sweepingly condemned by
+the self-righteous white man as long as drinking bouts are a part of
+civilized customs; and at least one civilized nation has the gross
+proverb, "Better burst than waste."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+1658-1660
+
+RADISSON'S THIRD VOYAGE
+
+The Discovery of the Great Northwest--Radisson and his Brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, visit what are now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and the
+Canadian Northwest--Radisson's Prophecy on first beholding the
+West--Twelve Years before Marquette and Jolliet, Radisson sees the
+Mississippi--The Terrible Remains of Dollard's Fight seen on the Way
+down the Ottawa--Why Radisson's Explorations have been ignored
+
+
+While Radisson was among the Iroquois, the little world of New France
+had not been asleep.  Before Radisson was born, Jean Nicolet of Three
+Rivers had passed westward through the straits of Mackinaw and coasted
+down Lake Michigan as far as Green Bay.[1]  Some years later the great
+Jesuit martyr, Jogues, had preached to the Indians of Sault Ste. Marie;
+but beyond the Sault was an unknown world that beckoned the young
+adventurers of New France as with the hands of a siren.  Of the great
+beyond--known to-day as the Great Northwest--nothing had been learned
+but this: from it came the priceless stores of beaver pelts yearly
+brought down the Ottawa to Three Rivers by the Algonquins, and in it
+dwelt strange, wild races whose territory extended northwest and north
+to unknown nameless seas.
+
+The Great Beyond held the two things most coveted by ambitious young
+men of New France,--quick wealth by means of the fur trade and the
+immortal fame of being a first explorer.  Nicolet had gone only as far
+as Green Bay and Fox River; Jogues not far beyond the Sault.  What
+secrets lay in the Great Unknown?  Year after year young Frenchmen,
+fired with the zeal of the explorer, joined wandering tribes of
+Algonquins going up the Ottawa, in the hope of being taken beyond the
+Sault.  In August, 1656, there came from Green Bay two young Frenchmen
+with fifty canoes of Algonquins, who told of far-distant waters called
+Lake "Ouinipeg," and tribes of wandering hunters called "Christinos"
+(Crees), who spent their winters in a land bare of trees (the prairie),
+and their summers on the North Sea (Hudson's Bay).  They also told of
+other tribes, who were great warriors, living to the south,--these were
+the Sioux.  But the two Frenchmen had not gone beyond the Great
+Lakes.[2]  These Algonquins were received at Ch�teau St. Louis, Quebec,
+with pompous firing of cannon and other demonstrations of welcome.  So
+eager were the French to take possession of the new land that thirty
+young men equipped themselves to go back with the Indians; and the
+Jesuits sent out two priests, Leonard Gareau and Gabriel Dreuillettes,
+with a lay helper, Louis Bo�sme.  The sixty canoes left Quebec with
+more firing of guns for a God-speed; but at Lake St. Peter the Mohawks
+ambushed the flotilla.  The enterprise of exploring the Great Beyond
+was abandoned by all the French but two.  Gareau, who was mortally
+wounded on the Ottawa, probably by a Frenchman or renegade hunter, died
+at Montreal; and Dreuillettes did not go farther than Lake Nipissing.
+Here, Dreuillettes learned much of the Unknown from an old Nipissing
+chief.  He heard of six overland routes to the bay of the North, whence
+came such store of peltry.[3]  He, too, like the two Frenchmen from
+Green Bay, heard of wandering tribes who had no settled lodge like the
+Hurons and Iroquois, but lived by the chase,--Crees and Sioux and
+Assiniboines of the prairie, at constant war round a lake called
+"Ouinipegouek."
+
+[Illustration: A Cree brave, with the wampum string.]
+
+By one of those curious coincidences of destiny which mark the lives of
+nations and men, the young Frenchman who had gone with the Jesuit,
+Dreuillettes, to Lake Nipissing when the other Frenchmen turned back,
+was M�dard Chouart Groseillers, the fur trader married to Radisson's
+widowed sister, Marguerite.[4]
+
+When Radisson came back from Onondaga, he found his brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, at Three Rivers, with ambitious designs of exploration in
+the unknown land of which he had heard at Green Bay and on Lake
+Nipissing.  Jacques Cartier had discovered only one great river, had
+laid the foundations of only one small province; Champlain had only
+made the circuit of the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Great Lakes;
+but here was a country--if the Indians spoke the truth--greater than
+all the empires of Europe together, a country bounded only by three
+great seas, the Sea of the North, the Sea of the South, and the Sea of
+Japan, a country so vast as to stagger the utmost conception of little
+New France.
+
+It was unnecessary for Groseillers to say more.  The ambition of young
+Radisson took fire.  Long ago, when a captive among the Mohawks, he had
+cherished boyish dreams that it was to be his "destiny to discover many
+wild nations"; and here was that destiny opening the door for him,
+pointing the way, beckoning to the toils and dangers and glories of the
+discoverer's life.  Radisson had been tortured among the Mohawks and
+besieged among the Onondagas.  Groseillers had been among the Huron
+missions that were destroyed and among the Algonquin canoes that were
+attacked.  Both explorers knew what perils awaited them; but what
+youthful blood ever chilled at prospect of danger when a single _coup_
+might win both wealth and fame?  Radisson had not been home one month;
+but he had no sooner heard the plan than he "longed to see himself in a
+boat."
+
+A hundred and fifty Algonquins had come down the Ottawa from the Great
+Beyond shortly after Radisson returned from Onondaga.  Six of these
+Algonquins had brought their furs to Three Rivers.  Some emissaries had
+gone to Quebec to meet the governor; but the majority of the Indians
+remained at Montreal to avoid the ambuscade of the Mohawks on Lake St.
+Peter.  Radisson and Groseillers were not the only Frenchmen conspiring
+to wrest fame and fortune from the Upper Country.  When the Indians
+came back from Quebec, they were accompanied by thirty young French
+adventurers, gay as boys out of school or gold hunters before the first
+check to their plans.  There were also two Jesuits sent out to win the
+new domain for the cross.[5]  As ignorant as children of the hardships
+ahead, the other treasure-seekers kept up nonchalant boasting that
+roused the irony of such seasoned men as Radisson and Groseillers.
+"What fairer bastion than a good tongue," Radisson demands cynically,
+"especially when one sees his own chimney smoke? . . .  It is different
+when food is wanting, work necessary day and night, sleep taken on the
+bare ground or to mid-waist in water, with an empty stomach, weariness
+in the bones, and bad weather overhead."
+
+Giving the slip to their noisy companions, Radisson and Groseillers
+stole out from Three Rivers late one night in June, accompanied by
+Algonquin guides.  Travelling only at night to avoid Iroquois spies,
+they came to Montreal in three days.  Here were gathered one hundred
+and forty Indians from the Upper Country, the thirty French, and the
+two priests.  No gun was fired at Montreal, lest the Mohawks should get
+wind of the departure; and the flotilla of sixty canoes spread over
+Lake St. Louis for the far venture of the _Pays d'en Haut_.  Three days
+of work had silenced the boasting of the gay adventurers; and the
+_voyageurs_, white and red, were now paddling in swift silence.  Safety
+engendered carelessness.  As the fleet seemed to be safe from Iroquois
+ambush, the canoes began to scatter.  Some loitered behind.  Hunters
+went ashore to shoot.  The hills began to ring with shot and call.  At
+the first _portage_ many of the canoes were nine and ten miles apart.
+Enemies could have set on the Algonquins in some narrow defile and
+slaughtered the entire company like sheep in a pen.  Radisson and
+Groseillers warned the Indians of the risk they were running.  Many of
+these Algonquins had never before possessed firearms.  With the muskets
+obtained in trade at Three Rivers, they thought themselves invincible
+and laughed all warning to scorn.  Radisson and Groseillers were told
+that they were a pair of timid squaws; and the canoes spread apart till
+not twenty were within call.  As they skirted the wooded shores, a man
+suddenly dashed from the forest with an upraised war-hatchet in one
+hand and a blanket streaming from his shoulders.  He shouted for them
+to come to him.  The Algonquins were panic-stricken.  Was the man
+pursued by Mohawks, or laying a trap to lure them within shooting
+range?  Seeing them hesitate, the Indian threw down blanket and hatchet
+to signify that he was defenceless, and rushed into the water to his
+armpits.
+
+"I would save you," he shouted in Iroquois.
+
+The Algonquins did not understand.  They only knew that he spoke the
+tongue of the hated enemy and was unarmed.  In a trice, the Algonquins
+in the nearest canoe had thrown out a well-aimed lasso, roped the man
+round the waist, and drawn him a captive into the canoe.
+
+"Brothers," protested the captive, who seems to have been either a
+Huron slave or an Iroquois magician, "your enemies are spread up and
+down!  Sleep not!  They have heard your noise!  They wait for you!
+They are sure of their prey!  Believe me--keep together!  Spend not
+your powder in vain to frighten your enemies by noise!  See that the
+stones of your arrows be not bent!  Bend your bows!  Keep your hatchets
+sharp!  Build a fort!  Make haste!"
+
+But the Algonquins, intoxicated with the new power of firearms, would
+hear no warning.  They did not understand his words and refused to heed
+Radisson's interpretation.  Beating paddles on their canoes and firing
+off guns, they shouted derisively that the man was "a dog and a hen."
+All the same, they did not land to encamp that night, but slept in
+midstream, with their boats tied to the rushes or on the lee side of
+floating trees.  The French lost heart.  If this were the beginning,
+what of the end?  Daylight had scarcely broken when the paddles of the
+eager _voyageurs_ were cutting the thick gray mist that rose from the
+river to get away from observation while the fog still hid the fleet.
+From afar came the dull, heavy rumble of a waterfall.[6]
+
+There was a rush of the twelve foremost canoes to reach the landing and
+cross the _portage_ before the thinning mist lifted entirely.  Twelve
+boats had got ashore when the fog was cleft by a tremendous crashing of
+guns, and Iroquois ambushed in the bordering forest let go a salute of
+musketry.  Everything was instantly in confusion.  Abandoning their
+baggage to the enemy, the Algonquins and French rushed for the woods to
+erect a barricade.  This would protect the landing of the other canoes.
+The Iroquois immediately threw up a defence of fallen logs likewise,
+and each canoe that came ashore was greeted with a cross fire between
+the two barricades.  Four canoes were destroyed and thirteen of the
+Indians from the Upper Country killed.  As day wore on, the Iroquois'
+shots ceased, and the Algonquins celebrated the truce by killing and
+devouring all the prisoners they had taken, among whom was the magician
+who had given them warning.  Radisson and Groseillers wondered if the
+Iroquois were reserving their powder for a night raid.  The Algonquins
+did not wait to know.  As soon as darkness fell, there was a wild
+scramble for the shore.  A long, low trumpet call, such as hunters use,
+signalled the Algonquins to rally and rush for the boats.  The French
+embarked as best they could.  The Indians swam and paddled for the
+opposite shore of the river.  Here, in the dark, hurried council was
+taken.  The most of the baggage had been lost.  The Indians refused to
+help either the Jesuits or the French, and it was impossible for the
+white _voyageurs_ to keep up the pace in the dash across an unknown
+_portage_ through the dark.  The French adventurers turned back for
+Montreal.  Of the white men, Radisson and Groseillers alone went on.
+
+Frightened into their senses by the encounter, the Algonquins now
+travelled only at night till they were far beyond range of the
+Iroquois.  All day the fugitive band lay hidden in the woods.  They
+could not hunt, lest Mohawk spies might hear the gunshots.  Provisions
+dwindled.  In a short time the food consisted of _tripe de roche_--a
+greenish moss boiled into a soup--and the few fish that might be caught
+during hurried nightly launch or morning landing.  Sometimes they hid
+in a berry patch, when the fruit was gathered and boiled, but
+camp-fires were stamped out and covered.  Turning westward, they
+crossed the barren region of iron-capped rocks and dwarf growth between
+the Upper Ottawa and the Great Lakes.  Now they were farther from the
+Iroquois, and staved off famine by shooting an occasional bear in the
+berry patches.  For a thousand miles they had travelled against stream,
+carrying their boats across sixty _portages_.  Now they glided with the
+current westward to Lake Nipissing.  On the lake, the Upper Indians
+always _cached_ provisions.  Fish, otter, and beaver were plentiful;
+but again they refrained from using firearms, for Iroquois footprints
+had been found on the sand.
+
+From Lake Nipissing they passed to Lake Huron, where the fleet divided.
+Radisson and Groseillers went with the Indians, who crossed Lake Huron
+for Green Bay on Lake Michigan.  The birch canoes could not venture
+across the lake in storms; so the boats rounded southward, keeping
+along the shore of Georgian Bay.  Cedar forests clustered down the
+sandy reaches of the lake.  Rivers dark as cathedral aisles rolled
+their brown tides through the woods to the blue waters of Lake Huron.
+At one point Groseillers recognized the site of the ruined Jesuit
+missions.  The Indians waited the chance of a fair day, and paddled
+over to the straits at the entrance to Lake Michigan.  At Manitoulin
+Island were Huron refugees, among whom were, doubtless, the waiting
+families of the Indians with Radisson.  All struck south for Green Bay.
+So far Radisson and Groseillers had travelled over beaten ground.  Now
+they were at the gateway of the Great Beyond, where no white man had
+yet gone.
+
+The first thing done on taking up winter quarters on Green Bay was to
+appease the friends of those warriors slain by the Mohawks.  A
+distribution of gifts had barely dried up the tears of mourning when
+news came of Iroquois on the war-path.  Radisson did not wait for fear
+to unman the Algonquin warriors.  Before making winter camp, he offered
+to lead a band of volunteers against the marauders.  For two days he
+followed vague tracks through the autumn-tinted forests.  Here were
+markings of the dead leaves turned freshly up; there a moccasin print
+on the sand; and now the ashes of a hidden camp-fire lying in almost
+imperceptible powder on fallen logs told where the Mohawks had
+bivouacked.  On the third day Radisson caught the ambushed band
+unprepared, and fell upon the Iroquois so furiously that not one
+escaped.
+
+After that the Indians of the Upper Country could not do too much for
+the white men.  Radisson and Groseillers were conducted from camp to
+camp in triumph.  Feasts were held.  Ambassadors went ahead with gifts
+from the Frenchmen; and companies of women marched to meet the
+explorers, chanting songs of welcome.  "But our mind was not to stay
+here," relates Radisson, "but to know the remotest people; and, because
+we had been willing to die in their defence, these Indians consented to
+conduct us."
+
+Before the opening of spring, 1659, Radisson and Groseillers had been
+guided across what is now Wisconsin to "a mighty river, great, rushing,
+profound, and comparable to the St. Lawrence." [7]  On the shores of
+the river they found a vast nation--"the people of the fire," prairie
+tribes, a branch of the Sioux, who received them well.[8]  This river
+was undoubtedly the Upper Mississippi, now for the first time seen by
+white men.  Radisson and Groseillers had discovered the Great
+Northwest.[9]  They were standing on the threshold of the Great Beyond.
+They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed,
+not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a
+short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories.
+They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,--illimitable reaches of
+prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open
+meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon.  They saw a land
+waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire
+waiting for the nation builders.
+
+[Illustration: An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux.]
+
+What were Radisson's thoughts?  Did he realize the importance of his
+discovery?  Could he have the vaguest premonition that he had opened a
+door of escape from stifled older lands to a higher type of manhood and
+freedom than the most sanguine dreamer had ever hoped?[10]  After an
+act has come to fruition, it is easy to read into the actor's mind
+fuller purpose than he could have intended.  Columbus could not have
+realized to what the discovery of America would lead.  Did Radisson
+realize what the discovery of the Great Northwest meant?
+
+Here is what he says, in that curious medley of idioms which so often
+results when a speaker knows many languages but is master of none:--
+
+"The country was so pleasant, so beautiful, and so fruitful, that it
+grieved me to see that the world could not discover such inticing
+countries to live in.  This, I say, because the Europeans fight for a
+rock in the sea against one another, or for a steril land . . .  where
+the people by changement of air engender sickness and die. . . .
+Contrariwise, these kingdoms are so delicious and under so temperate a
+climate, plentiful of all things, and the earth brings forth its fruit
+twice a year, that the people live long and lusty and wise in their
+way.  What a conquest would this be, at little or no cost?  What
+pleasure should people have . . . instead of misery and poverty!  Why
+should not men reap of the love of God here?  Surely, more is to be
+gained converting souls here than in differences of creed, when wrongs
+are committed under pretence of religion! . . .  It is true, I
+confess, . . . that access here is difficult . . . but nothing is to be
+gained without labor and pains." [11]
+
+[Illustration: Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in
+Montreal by Mr. McNab.  The date on the picture is 1669.]
+
+Here Radisson foreshadows all the best gains that the West has
+accomplished for the human race.  What are they?  Mainly room,--room to
+live and room for opportunity; equal chances for all classes, high and
+low; plenty for all classes, high and low; the conquests not of war but
+of peace.  The question arises,--when Radisson discovered the Great
+Northwest ten years before Marquette and Jolliet, twenty years before
+La Salle, a hundred years before De la V�rendrye, why has his name been
+slurred over and left in oblivion?[12]  The reasons are plain.
+Radisson was a Christian, but he was not a slave to any creed.  Such
+liberality did not commend itself to the annalists of an age that was
+still rioting in a very carnival of religious persecution.  Radisson
+always invoked the blessing of Heaven on his enterprises and rendered
+thanks for his victories; but he was indifferent as to whether he was
+acting as lay helper with the Jesuits, or allied to the Huguenots of
+London and Boston.  His discoveries were too important to be ignored by
+the missionaries.  They related his discoveries, but refrained from
+mentioning his name, though twice referring to Groseillers.  What hurt
+Radisson's fame even more than his indifference to creeds was his
+indifference to nationality.  Like Columbus, he had little care what
+flag floated at the prow, provided only that the prow pushed on and on
+and on,--into the Unknown.  He sold his services alternately to France
+and England till he had offended both governments; and, in addition to
+withstanding a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Church, his
+fame encountered the ill-will of state historians.  He is mentioned as
+"the adventurer," "the hang-dog," "the renegade."  Only in 1885, when
+the manuscript of his travels was rescued from oblivion, did it become
+evident that history must be rewritten.  Here was a man whose
+discoveries were second only to those of Columbus, and whose
+explorations were more far-ranging and important than those of
+Champlain and La Salle and De la V�rendrye put together.
+
+
+The spring of 1659 found the explorers still among the prairie tribes
+of the Mississippi.  From these people Radisson learned of four other
+races occupying vast, undiscovered countries.  He heard of the Sioux, a
+warlike nation to the west, who had no fixed abode but lived by the
+chase and were at constant war with another nomadic tribe to the
+north--the Crees.  The Crees spent the summer time round the shores of
+salt water, and in winter came inland to hunt.  Between these two was a
+third,--the Assiniboines,--who used earthen pots for cooking, heated
+their food by throwing hot stones in water, and dressed themselves in
+buckskin.  These three tribes were wandering hunters; but the people of
+the fire told Radisson of yet another nation, who lived in villages
+like the Iroquois, on "a great river that divided itself in two," and
+was called "the Forked River," because "it had two branches, the one
+toward the west, the other toward the south, . . . toward Mexico."
+These people were the Mandans or Omahas, or Iowas, or other people of
+the Missouri.[13]
+
+A whole world of discoveries lay before them.  In what direction should
+they go?  "We desired not to go to the north till we had made a
+discovery in the south," explains Radisson.  The people of the fire
+refused to accompany the explorers farther; so the two "put themselves
+in hazard," as Radisson relates, and set out alone.  They must have
+struck across the height of land between the Mississippi and the
+Missouri; for Radisson records that they met several nations having
+villages, "all amazed to see us and very civil.  The farther we
+sojourned, the delightfuller the land became.  I can say that in all my
+lifetime I have never seen a finer country, for all that I have been in
+Italy.  The people have very long hair.  They reap twice a year.  They
+war against the Sioux and the Cree. . . .  It was very hot there. . . .
+Being among the people they told us . . . of men that built great
+cabins and have beards and have knives like the French."  The Indians
+showed Radisson a string of beads only used by Europeans.  These people
+must have been the Spaniards of the south.  The tribes on the Missouri
+were large men of well-formed figures.  There were no deformities among
+the people.  Radisson saw corn and pumpkins in their gardens.  "Their
+arrows were not of stone, but of fish bones. . . .  Their dishes were
+made of wood. . . .  They had great calumets of red and green
+stone . . . and great store of tobacco. . . .  They had a kind of drink
+that made them mad for a whole day." [14]  "We had not yet seen the
+Sioux," relates Radisson.  "We went toward the south and came back by
+the north."  The _Jesuit Relations_ are more explicit.  Written the
+year that Radisson returned to Quebec, they state: "Continuing their
+wanderings, our two young Frenchmen visited the Sioux, where they found
+five thousand warriors.  They then left this nation for another warlike
+people, who with bows and arrows had rendered themselves redoubtable."
+These were the Crees, with whom, say the Jesuits, wood is so rare and
+small that nature has taught them to make fire of a kind of coal and to
+cover their cabins with skins of the chase.  The explorers seem to have
+spent the summer hunting antelope, buffalo, moose, and wild turkey.
+The Sioux received them cordially, supplied them with food, and gave
+them an escort to the next encampments.  They had set out southwest to
+the Mascoutins, Mandans, and perhaps, also, the Omahas.  They were now
+circling back northeastward toward the Sault between Lake Michigan and
+Lake Superior.  How far westward had they gone?  Only two facts gave
+any clew.  Radisson reports that mountains lay far inland; and the
+Jesuits record that the explorers were among tribes that used coal.
+This must have been a country far west of the Mandans and Mascoutins
+and within sight of at least the Bad Lands, or that stretch of rough
+country between the prairie and outlying foothills of the Rockies.[15]
+The course of the first exploration seems to have circled over the
+territory now known as Wisconsin, perhaps eastern Iowa and Nebraska,
+South Dakota, Montana, and back over North Dakota and Minnesota to the
+north shore of Lake Superior.  "The lake toward the north is full of
+rocks, yet great ships can ride in it without danger," writes Radisson.
+At the Sault they found the Crees and Sautaux in bitter war.  They also
+heard of a French establishment, and going to visit it found that the
+Jesuits had established a mission.
+
+Radisson had explored the Southwest.  He now decided to essay the
+Northwest.  When the Sautaux were at war with the Crees, he met the
+Crees and heard of the great salt sea in the north.  Surely this was
+the Sea of the North--Hudson Bay--of which the Nipissing chief had told
+Groseillers long ago.  Then the Crees had great store of beaver pelts;
+and trade must not be forgotten.  No sooner had peace been arranged
+between Sautaux and Crees, than Cree hunters flocked out of the
+northern forests to winter on Lake Superior.  A rumor of Iroquois on
+the war-path compelled Radisson and Groseillers to move their camp back
+from Lake Superior higher up the chain of lakes and rivers between what
+is now Minnesota and Canada, toward the country of the Sioux.  In the
+fall of 1659 Groseillers' health began to fail from the hardships; so
+he remained in camp for the winter, attending to the trade, while
+Radisson carried on the explorations alone.
+
+This was one of the coldest winters known in Canada.[16]  The snow fell
+so heavily in the thick pine woods of Minnesota that Radisson says the
+forest became as sombre as a cellar.  The colder the weather the better
+the fur, and, presenting gifts to insure safe conduct, Radisson set out
+with a band of one hundred and fifty Cree hunters for the Northwest.
+They travelled on snow-shoes, hunting moose on the way and sleeping at
+night round a camp-fire under the stars.  League after league, with no
+sound through the deathly white forest but the soft crunch-crunch of
+the snowshoes, they travelled two hundred miles toward what is now
+Manitoba.  When they had set out, the snow was like a cushion.  Now it
+began to melt in the spring sun, and clogged the snow-shoes till it was
+almost impossible to travel.  In the morning the surface was glazed
+ice, and they could march without snow-shoes.  Spring thaw called a
+halt to their exploration.  The Crees encamped for three weeks to build
+boats.  As soon as the ice cleared, the band launched back down-stream
+for the appointed rendezvous on Green Bay.  All that Radisson learned
+on this trip was that the Bay of the North lay much farther from Lake
+Superior than the old Nipissing chief had told Dreuillettes and
+Groseillers.[17]
+
+Groseillers had all in readiness to depart for Quebec; and five hundred
+Indians from the Upper Country had come together to go down the Ottawa
+and St. Lawrence with the explorers.  As they were about to embark,
+_coureurs_ came in from the woods with news that more than a thousand
+Iroquois were on the war-path, boasting that they would exterminate the
+French.[18]  Somewhere along the Ottawa a small band of Hurons had been
+massacred.  The Indians with Groseillers and Radisson were terrified.
+A council of the elders was called.
+
+"Brothers, why are ye so foolish as to put yourselves in the hands of
+those that wait for you?" demanded an old chief, addressing the two
+white men.  "The Iroquois will destroy you and carry you away captive.
+Will you have your brethren, that love you, slain?  Who will baptize
+our children?"  (Radisson and Groseillers had baptized more than two
+hundred children.[19])  "Stay till next year!  Then you may freely go!
+Our mothers will send their children to be taught in the way of the
+Lord!"
+
+Fear is like fire.  It must be taken in the beginning, or it spreads.
+The explorers retired, decided on a course of action, and requested the
+Indians to meet them in council a second time.  Eight hundred warriors
+assembled, seating themselves in a circle.  Radisson and Groseillers
+took their station in the centre.[20]
+
+"Who am I?" demanded Groseillers, hotly.  "Am I a foe or a friend?  If
+a foe, why did you suffer me to live?  If a friend, listen what I say!
+You know that we risked our lives for you!  If we have no courage, why
+did you not tell us?  If you have more wit than we, why did you not use
+it to defend yourselves against the Iroquois?  How can you defend your
+wives and children unless you get arms from the French!"
+
+"Fools," cried Radisson, striking a beaver skin across an Indian's
+shoulder, "will you fight the Iroquois with beaver pelts?  Do you not
+know the French way?  We fight with guns, not robes.  The Iroquois will
+coop you up here till you have used all your powder, and then despatch
+you with ease!  Shall your children be slaves because you are cowards?
+Do what you will!  For my part I choose to die like a man rather than
+live like a beggar.  Take back your beaver robes.  We can live without
+you--" and the white men strode out from the council.
+
+Consternation reigned among the Indians.  There was an uproar of
+argument.  For six days the fate of the white men hung fire.  Finally
+the chiefs sent word that the five hundred young warriors would go to
+Quebec with the white men.  Radisson did not give their ardor time to
+cool.  They embarked at once.  The fleet of canoes crossed the head of
+the lakes and came to the Upper Ottawa without adventure.  Scouts went
+ahead to all the _portages_, and great care was taken to avoid an
+ambush when passing overland.  Below the Chaudi�re Falls the scouts
+reported that four Iroquois boats had crossed the river.  Again
+Radisson did not give time for fear.  He sent the lightest boats in
+pursuit; and while keeping the enemy thus engaged with half his own
+company on guard at the ends of the long _portage_, he hurriedly got
+cargoes and canoes across the landing.  The Iroquois had fled.  By that
+Radisson knew they were weak.  Somewhere along the Long Sault Rapids,
+the scouts saw sixteen Iroquois canoes.  The Indians would have thrown
+down their goods and fled, but Radisson instantly got his forces in
+hand and held them with a grip of steel.  Distributing loaded muskets
+to the bravest warriors, he pursued the Iroquois with a picked company
+of Hurons, Algonquins, Sautaux, and Sioux.  Beating their paddles,
+Radisson's company shouted the war-cry till the hills rang; but all the
+warriors were careful not to waste an ounce of powder till within
+hitting range.  The Iroquois were not used to this sort of defence.
+They fled.  The Long Sault was always the most dangerous part of the
+Ottawa.  Radisson kept scouts to rear and fore, but the Iroquois had
+deserted their boats and were hanging on the flanks of the company to
+attempt an ambush.  It was apparent that a fort had been erected at the
+foot of the rapids.  Leaving half the band in their boats, Radisson
+marched overland with two hundred warriors.  Iroquois shots spattered
+from each side; but the Huron muskets kept the assailants at a
+distance, and those of Radisson's warriors who had not guns were armed
+with bows and arrows, and wore a shield of buffalo skin dried hard as
+metal.  The Iroquois rushed for the barricade at the foot of the Sault.
+Five of them were picked off as they ran.  For a moment the Iroquois
+were out of cover, and their weakness was betrayed.  They had only one
+hundred and fifty men, while Radisson had five hundred; but the odds
+would not long be in his favor.  Ammunition was running out, and the
+enemy must be dislodged without wasting a shot.  Radisson called back
+encouragement to his followers.  They answered with a shout.  Tying the
+beaver pelts in great bundles, the Indians rolled the fur in front
+nearer and nearer the Iroquois boats, keeping under shelter from the
+shots of the fort.  The Iroquois must either lose their boats and be
+cut off from escape, or retire from the fort.  It was not necessary for
+Radisson's warriors to fire a shot.  Abandoning even their baggage and
+glad to get off with their lives, the Iroquois dashed to save their
+boats.
+
+[Illustration: Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River.]
+
+A terrible spectacle awaited Radisson inside the enclosure of the
+palisades.[21]  The scalps of dead Indians flaunted from the pickets.
+Not a tree but was spattered with bullet marks as with bird shot.  Here
+and there burnt holes gaped in the stockades like wounds.  Outside
+along the river bank lay the charred bones of captives who had been
+burned.  The scarred fort told its own tale.  Here refugees had been
+penned up by the Iroquois till thirst and starvation did their work.
+In the clay a hole had been dug for water by the parched victims, and
+the ooze through the mud eagerly scooped up.  Only when he reached
+Montreal did Radisson learn the story of the dismantled fort.  The
+rumor carried to the explorers on Lake Michigan of a thousand Iroquois
+going on the war-path to exterminate the French had been only too true.
+Half the warriors were to assault Quebec, half to come down on Montreal
+from the Ottawa.  One thing only could save the French--to keep the
+bands apart.  Those on the Ottawa had been hunting all winter and must
+necessarily be short of powder.  To intercept them, a gallant band of
+seventeen French, four Algonquins, and sixty Hurons led by Dollard took
+their stand at the Long Sault.  The French and their Indian allies were
+boiling their kettles when two hundred Iroquois broke from the woods.
+There was no time to build a fort.  Leaving their food, Dollard and his
+men threw themselves into the rude palisades which Indians had erected
+the previous year.  The Iroquois kept up a constant fire and sent for
+reinforcements of six hundred warriors, who were on the Richelieu.  In
+defiance the Indians fighting for the French sallied out, scalped the
+fallen Iroquois, and hoisted the sanguinary trophies on long poles
+above the pickets.  The enraged Iroquois redoubled their fury.  The
+fort was too small to admit all the Hurons; and when the Iroquois came
+up from the Richelieu with Huron renegades among their warriors, the
+Hurons deserted their French allies and went over in a body to the
+enemy.  For two days the French had fought against two hundred
+Iroquois.  For five more days they fought against eight hundred.  "The
+worst of it was," relates Radisson, "the French had no water, as we
+plainly saw; for they had made a hole in the ground out of which they
+could get but little because the fort was on a hill.  It was pitiable.
+There was not a tree but what was shot with bullets.  The Iroquois had
+rushed to make a breach (in the wall). . . . The French set fire to a
+barrel of powder to drive the Iroquois back . . . but it fell inside
+the fort. . . . Upon this, the Iroquois entered . . . so that not one
+of the French escaped. . . .  It was terrible . . . for we came there
+eight days after the defeat." [22]
+
+Without a doubt it was Dollard's splendid fight that put fear in the
+hearts of the Iroquois who fled before Radisson.  The passage to
+Montreal was clear.  The boats ran the rapids without unloading; but
+Groseillers almost lost his life.  His canoe caught on a rock in
+midstream, but righting herself shot down safely to the landing with no
+greater loss than a damaged keel.  The next day, after two years'
+absence, Radisson and Groseillers arrived at Montreal.  A brief stop
+was made at Three Rivers for rest till twenty citizens had fitted out
+two shallops with cannon to escort the discoverers in fitting pomp to
+Quebec.  As the fleet of canoes glided round Cape Diamond, battery and
+bastion thundered a welcome.  Welcome they were, and thrice welcome;
+for so ceaseless had been the Iroquois wars that the three French ships
+lying at anchor would have returned to France without a single beaver
+skin if the explorers had not come.  Citizens shouted from the terraced
+heights of Ch�teau St. Louis, and bells rang out the joy of all New
+France over the discoverers' return.  For a week Radisson and
+Groseillers were f�ted.  Viscomte d'Argenson, the new governor,
+presented them with gifts and sent two brigantines to carry them home
+to Three Rivers.  There they rested for the remainder of the year,
+Groseillers at his seigniory with his wife, Marguerite; Radisson, under
+the parental roof.[23]
+
+
+[1] Mr. Benjamin Sulte establishes this date as 1634.
+
+[2] See _Jesuit Relations_, 1656-57-58.  I have purposely refrained
+from entering into the heated controversy as to the identity of these
+two men.  It is apart from the subject, as there is no proof these men
+went beyond the Green Bay region.
+
+[3] These routes were; (1) By the Saguenay, (2) by Three Rivers and the
+St. Maurice, (3) by Lake Nipissing, (4) by Lake Huron, through the land
+of the Sautaux, (5) by Lake Superior overland, (6) by the Ottawa.  See
+_Jesuit Relations_ for detailed accounts of these routes.  Dreuillettes
+went farther west to the Crees a few years later, but that does not
+concern this narrative.
+
+[4] The dispute as to whether eastern Minnesota was discovered on the
+1654-55-56 trip, and whether Groseillers discovered it, is a point for
+savants, but will, I think, remain an unsettled dispute.
+
+[5] The _Relations_ do not give the names of these two Jesuits,
+probably owing to the fact that the enterprise failed.  They simply
+state that two priests set out, but were compelled to remain behind
+owing to the caprice of the savages.
+
+[6] Whether they were now on the Ottawa or the St. Lawrence, it is
+impossible to tell.  Dr. Dionne thinks that the band went overland from
+Lake Ontario to Lake Huron.  I know both waters--Lake Ontario and the
+Ottawa--from many trips, and I think Radisson's description here
+tallies with his other descriptions of the Ottawa.  It is certain that
+they must have been on the Ottawa before they came to the Lake of the
+Castors or Nipissing.  The noise of the waterfall seems to point to the
+Chaudi�re Falls of the Ottawa.  If so, the landing place would be the
+tongue of land running out from Hull, opposite the city of Ottawa, and
+the _portage_ would be the Aylmer Road beyond the rapids above the
+falls.  Mr. Benjamin Sulte, the scholarly historian, thinks they went
+by way of the Ottawa, not Lake Ontario, as the St. Lawrence route was
+not used till 1702.
+
+[7] _Jesuit Relations_, 1660.
+
+[8] _Jesuit Relations_, 1660, and _Radisson's Journal_.  These "people
+of the fire," or Mascoutins, were in three regions, (1) Wisconsin, (2)
+Nebraska, (3) on the Missouri.  See Appendix E.
+
+[9] Benjamin Sulte unequivocally states that the river was the
+Mississippi.  Of writers contemporaneous with Radisson, the Jesuits,
+Marie de l'Incarnation, and Charlevoix corroborate Radisson's account.
+In the face of this, what are we to think of modern writers with a
+reputation to lose, who brush Radisson's exploits aside as a possible
+fabrication?  The only conclusion is that they have not read his
+_Journal_.
+
+[10] I refer to Radisson alone, because for half the time in 1659
+Groseillers was ill at the lake, and we cannot be sure that he
+accompanied Radisson in all the journeys south and west, though
+Radisson generously always includes him as "we."  Besides, Groseillers
+seems to have attended to the trading, Radisson to the exploring.
+
+[11] If any one cares to render Radisson's peculiar jumble of French,
+English, Italian, and Indian idioms into more intelligent form, they
+may try their hand at it.  His meaning is quite clear; but the words
+are a medley.  The passage is to be found on pp. 150-151, of the
+_Prince Society Reprint_.  See also _Jesuit Relations_, 1660.
+
+[12] It will be noted that what I claim for Radisson is the honor of
+discovering the Great Northwest, and refrain from trying to identify
+his movements with the modern place names of certain states.  I have
+done this intentionally--though it would have been easy to advance
+opinions about Green Bay, Fox River, and the Wisconsin, and so become
+involved in the childish quarrel that has split the western historical
+societies and obscured the main issue of Radisson's feat.  Needless to
+say, the world does not care whether Radisson went by way of the
+Menominee, or snow-shoed across country.  The question is: Did he reach
+the Mississippi Valley before Marquette and Jolliet and La Salle?  That
+question this chapter answers.
+
+[13] I have refrained from quoting Radisson's names for the different
+Indian tribes because it would only be "caviare to the general."  If
+Radisson's manuscript be consulted it will be seen that the crucial
+point is the whereabouts of the Mascoutins--or people of the fire.
+Reference to the last part of Appendix E will show that these people
+extended far beyond the Wisconsin to the Missouri.  It is ignorance of
+this fact that has created such bitter and childish controversy about
+the exact direction taken by Radisson west-north-west of the
+Mascoutins.  The exact words of the document in the Marine Department
+are; "In the lower Missipy there are several other nations very
+numerous with whom we have no commerce who are trading yet with nobody.
+Above Missoury river which is in the Mississippi below the river
+Illinois, to the south, there are the Mascoutins, Nadoessioux (Sioux)
+with whom we trade and who are numerous."  Benjamin Sulte was one of
+the first to discover that the Mascoutins had been in Nebraska, though
+he does not attempt to trace this part of Radisson's journey definitely.
+
+[14] The entire account of the people on "the Forked River" is so exact
+an account of the Mandans that it might be a page from Catlin's
+descriptions two centuries later.  The long hair, the two crops a year,
+the tobacco, the soap-stone calumets, the stationary villages, the
+knowledge of the Spaniards, the warm climate--all point to a region far
+south of the Northern States, to which so many historians have stupidly
+and with almost wilful ignorance insisted on limiting Radisson's
+travels.  Parkman has been thoroughly honest in the matter.  His _La
+Salle_ had been written before the discovery of the _Radisson
+Journals_; but in subsequent editions he acknowledges in a footnote
+that Radisson had been to "the Forked River."  Other writers (with the
+exception of five) have been content to quote from Radisson's enemies
+instead of going directly to his journals.  Even Garneau slurs over
+Radisson's explorations; but Garneau, too, wrote before the discovery
+of the Radisson papers.  Abb� Tanguay, who is almost infallible on
+French-Canadian matters, slips up on Radisson, because his writings
+preceded the publication of the _Radisson Relations_.  The five writers
+who have attempted to redeem Radisson's memory from ignominy are: Dr.
+N. E. Dionne, of the Parliamentary Library, Quebec; Mr. Justice
+Prudhomme, of St. Boniface, Manitoba; Dr. George Bryce, of Winnepeg,
+Mr. Benjamin Sulte, of Ottawa; and Judge J. V. Brower, of St. Paul.  It
+ever a monument be erected to Radisson--as one certainly ought in every
+province and state west of the Great Lakes--the names of these four
+champions should be engraved upon it.
+
+[15] This claim will, I know, stagger preconceived ideas.  In the light
+of only Radisson's narrative, the third voyage has usually been
+identified with Wisconsin and Minnesota; but in the light of the
+_Jesuit Relations_, written the year that Radisson returned, to what
+tribes could the descriptions apply?  Even Parkman's footnote
+acknowledged that Radisson was among the people of the Missouri.  Grant
+that, and the question arises, What people on the Missouri answer the
+description?  The Indians of the far west use not only coal for fire,
+but raw galena to make bullets for their guns.  In fact, it was that
+practice of the tribes of Idaho that led prospectors to find the Blue
+Bell Mine of Kootenay.  Granting that the Jesuit account--which was of
+course, from hearsay--mistook the use of turf, dry grass, or buffalo
+refuse for a kind of coal, the fact remains that only the very far
+western tribes had this custom.
+
+[16] _Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_.
+
+[17] _Jesuit Relations_, 1658.
+
+[18] See Marie de l'Incarnation, Dollier de Casson, and Abb� Belmont.
+
+[19] _Jesuit Relations_, 1660.
+
+[20] It may be well to state as nearly as possible exactly _what_
+tribes Radisson had met in this trip.  Those rejoined on the way up at
+Manitoulin Island were refugee Hurons and Ottawas.  From the Hurons,
+Ottawas, and Algonquins of Green Bay, Radisson went west with
+Pottowatomies, from them to the Escotecke or Sioux of the Fire, namely
+a branch of the Mascoutins.  From these Wisconsin Mascoutins, he learns
+of the Nadoneceroron, or Sioux proper, and of the Christinos or Crees.
+Going west with the Mascoutins, he comes to "sedentary" tribes.  Are
+these the Mandans?  He compares this country to Italy.  From them he
+hears of white men, that he thinks may be Spaniards.  This tribe is at
+bitter war with Sioux and Crees.  At Green Bay he hears of the Sautaux
+in war with Crees.  His description of buffalo hunts among the Sioux
+tallies exactly with the Pembina hunts of a later day.  Oldmixon says
+that it was from Crees and Assiniboines visiting at Green Bay that
+Radisson learned of a way overland to the great game country of Hudson
+Bay.
+
+[21] There is a mistake in Radisson's account here, which is easily
+checked by contemporaneous accounts of Marie de l'Incarnation and
+Dollier de Casson.  Radisson describes Dollard's fight during his
+fourth trip in 1664, when it is quite plain that he means 1660.  The
+fight has been so thoroughly described by Mr. Parkman, who drew his
+material from the two authorities mentioned, and the _Jesuit Relations_
+that I do not give it in detail.  I give a brief account of Radisson's
+description of the tragedy.
+
+[22] It will be noticed that Radisson's account of the battle at the
+Long Sault--which I have given in his own words as far as
+possible--differs in details from the only other accounts written by
+contemporaries; namely, Marie de l'Incarnation, Dollier de Casson, the
+Abb� Belmont, and the Jesuits.  All these must have written from
+hearsay, for they were at Quebec and Montreal.  Radisson was on the
+spot a week after the tragedy; so that his account may be supposed to
+be as accurate as any.
+
+[23] Mr. Benjamin Sulte states that the explorers wintered on Green
+Bay, 1658-1659, then visited the tribes between Milwaukee and the river
+Wisconsin in the spring of 1659.  Here they learn of the Sioux and the
+Crees.  They push southwest first, where they see the Mississippi
+between April and July, 1659.  Thence they come back to the Sault.
+Then they winter, 1659-1660, among the Sioux.  I have not attempted to
+give the dates of the itinerary; because it would be a matter of
+speculation open to contradiction; but if we accept Radisson's account
+at all--and that account is corroborated by writers contemporaneous
+with him--we must then accept _his_ account of _where_ he went, and not
+the casual guesses of modern writers who have given his journal one
+hurried reading, and then sat down, without consulting documents
+contemporaneous with Radisson, to inform the world of _where_ he went.
+Because this is such a very sore point with two or three western
+historical societies, I beg to state the reasons why I have set down
+Radisson's itinerary as much farther west than has been generally
+believed, though how far west he went does not efface the main and
+essential fact _that Radisson was the true discoverer of the Great
+Northwest_.  For that, let us give him a belated credit and not obscure
+the feat by disputes.  (1) The term "Forked River" referred to the
+Missouri and Mississippi, not the Wisconsin and Mississippi.  (2) No
+other rivers in that region are to be compared to the Ottawa and St.
+Lawrence but the Missouri and Mississippi.  (3) The Mascoutins, or
+People of the Fire, among whom Radisson found himself when he descended
+the Wisconsin from Green Bay, conducted him westward only as far as the
+tribes allied to them, the Mascoutins of the Missouri or Nebraska.
+Hence, Radisson going west-north-west to the Sioux--as he says he
+did--must have skirted much farther west than Wisconsin and Minnesota.
+(4) His descriptions of the Indians who knew tribes in trade with the
+Spaniards must refer to the Indians south of the Big Bend of the
+Missouri.  (5) His description of the climate refers to the same
+region.  (6) The _Jesuit Relations_ confirm beyond all doubt that he
+was among the main body of the great Sioux Confederacy.  (7) Both his
+and the Jesuit reference is to the treeless prairie, which does not
+apply to the wooded lake regions of eastern Minnesota or northern
+Wisconsin.
+
+To me, it is simply astounding--and that is putting it mildly--that any
+one pretending to have read _Radisson's Journal_ can accuse him of
+"claiming" to have "descended to the salt sea" (Gulf of Mexico).
+Radisson makes no such claim; and to accuse him of such is like
+building a straw enemy for the sake of knocking him down, or stirring
+up muddy waters to make them look deep.  The exact words of Radisson's
+narrative are: "We went into ye great river that divides itself in 2,
+where the hurrons with some Ottauake . . . had retired. . . .  This
+nation have warrs against those of the Forked River . . . so called
+because it has 1 branches the one towards the west, the other towards
+the South, wch. we believe runns towards Mexico, by the tokens they
+gave us . . . they told us the prisoners they take tells them that they
+have warrs against a nation . . . that have great beards and such
+knives as we have" . . . etc., etc., etc. . . . "which made us believe
+they were Europeans."  This statement is _no_ claim that Radisson went
+to Mexico, but only that he met tribes who knew tribes trading with
+Spaniards of Mexico.  And yet, on the careless reading of this
+statement, one historian brands Radisson as a liar for "having claimed
+he went to Mexico."  The thing would be comical in its impudence if it
+were not that many such misrepresentations of what Radisson wrote have
+dimmed the glory of his real achievements.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+1661-1664
+
+RADISSON'S FOURTH VOYAGE
+
+The Success of the Explorers arouses Envy--It becomes known that they
+have heard of the Famous Sea of the North--When they ask Permission to
+resume their Explorations, the French Governor refuses except on
+Condition of receiving Half the Profits--In Defiance, the Explorers
+steal off at Midnight--They return with a Fortune and are driven from
+New France
+
+
+Radisson was not yet twenty-six years of age, and his explorations of
+the Great Northwest had won him both fame and fortune.  As Spain sought
+gold in the New Word, so France sought precious furs.  Furs were the
+only possible means of wealth to the French colony, and for ten years
+the fur trade had languished owing to the Iroquois wars.  For a year
+after the migration of the Hurons to Onondaga, not a single beaver skin
+was brought to Montreal.  Then began the annual visits of the Indians
+from the Upper Country to the forts of the St. Lawrence.  Sweeping down
+the northern rivers like wild-fowl, in far-spread, desultory flocks,
+came the Indians of the _Pays d'en Haut_.  Down the Ottawa to Montreal,
+down the St. Maurice to Three Rivers, down the Saguenay and round to
+Quebec, came the treasure-craft,--light fleets of birch canoes laden to
+the water-line with beaver skins.  Whence came the wealth that revived
+the languishing trade of New France?  From a vague, far Eldorado
+somewhere round a sea in the North.  Hudson had discovered this sea
+half a century before Radisson's day; Jean Bourdon, a Frenchman, had
+coasted up Labrador in 1657 seeking the Bay of the North; and on their
+last trip the explorers had learned from the Crees who came through the
+dense forests of the hinterland that there lay round this Bay of the
+North a vast country with untold wealth of furs.  The discovery of a
+route overland to the north sea was to become the lodestar of
+Radisson's life.[1]
+
+[Illustration: Montreal in 1760: 1, the St. Lawrence; 20, the Dock;
+18-19, Arsenal; 16, the Church; 13-15, the Convent and Hospital; 8-12,
+Sally-ports, River Side; 17, Cannon and Wall; 3-4-5, Houses on Island.]
+
+"We considered whether to reveal what we had learned," explains
+Radisson, "for we had _not_ been in the Bay of the North, knowing only
+what the Crees told us.  We wished to discover it ourselves and have
+assurance before revealing anything."  But the secret leaked out.
+Either Groseillers told his wife, or the Jesuits got wind of the news
+from the Indians; for it was announced from Quebec that two priests,
+young La Valli�re, the son of the governor at Three Rivers, six other
+Frenchmen, and some Indians would set out for the Bay of the North up
+the Saguenay.  Radisson was invited to join the company as a guide.
+Needless to say that a man who had already discovered the Great
+Northwest and knew the secret of the road to the North, refused to play
+a second part among amateur explorers.  Radisson promptly declined.
+Nevertheless, in May, 1661, the Jesuits, Gabriel Dreuillettes and
+Claude Dablon, accompanied by Couture, La Valli�re, and three others,
+set out with Indian guides for the discovery of Hudson's Bay by land.
+On June 1 they began to ascend the Saguenay, pressing through vast
+solitudes below the sombre precipices of the river.  The rapids were
+frequent, the heat was terrific, and the _portages_ arduous.  Owing to
+the obstinacy of the guides, the French were stopped north of Lake St.
+John.  Here the priests established a mission, and messengers were sent
+to Quebec for instructions.
+
+Meanwhile, Radisson and Groseillers saw that no time must be lost.  If
+they would be first in the North, as they had been first in the West,
+they must set out at once.  Two Indian guides from the Upper Country
+chanced to be in Montreal.  Groseillers secured them by bringing both
+to Three Rivers.  Then the explorers formally applied to the French
+governor, D'Avaugour, for permission to go on the voyage of discovery.
+New France regulated the fur trade by license.  Imprisonment, the
+galleys for life, even death on a second offence, were the punishments
+of those who traded without a license.  The governor's answer revealed
+the real animus behind his enthusiasm for discovery.  He would give the
+explorers a license if they would share half the profits of the trip
+with him and take along two of his servants as auditors of the returns.
+One can imagine the indignation of the dauntless explorers at this
+answer.  Their cargo of furs the preceding year had saved New France
+from bankruptcy.  Offering to venture their lives a second time for the
+extension of the French domain, they were told they might do so if they
+would share half the profits with an avaricious governor.  Their answer
+was characteristic.  Discoverers were greater than governors; still, if
+the Indians of the Upper Country invited his Excellency, Radisson and
+Groseillers would be glad to have the honor of his company; as for his
+servants--men who went on voyages of discovery had to act as both
+masters and servants.
+
+D'Avaugour was furious.  He issued orders forbidding the explorers to
+leave Three Rivers without his express permission.  Radisson and
+Groseillers knew the penalties of ignoring this order.  They asked the
+Jesuits to intercede for them.  Though Gareau had been slain trying to
+ascend the Ottawa and Father M�nard had by this time preached in the
+forests of Lake Michigan, the Jesuits had made no great discoveries in
+the Northwest.  All they got for their intercessions was a snub.[2]
+
+While messages were still passing between the governor and the
+explorers, there swept down the St. Lawrence to Three Rivers seven
+canoes of Indians from the Upper Country, asking for Radisson and
+Groseillers.  The explorers were honorable to a degree.  They notified
+the governor of Quebec that they intended to embark with the Indians.
+D'Avaugour stubbornly ordered the Indians to await the return of his
+party from the Saguenay.  The Indians made off to hide in the rushes of
+Lake St. Peter.  The sympathy of Three Rivers was with the explorers.
+Late one night in August Radisson and Groseillers--who was captain of
+the soldiers and carried the keys of the fort--slipped out from the
+gates, with a third Frenchman called Larivi�re.  As they stepped into
+their canoe, the sentry demanded, "Who goes?"  "Groseillers," came the
+answer through the dark.  "God give you a good voyage, sir," called the
+sentry, faithful to his captain rather than the governor.
+
+The skiff pushed out on the lapping tide.  A bend in the river--and the
+lights of the fort glimmering in long lines across the water had
+vanished behind.  The prow of Radisson's boat was once more heading
+upstream for the Unknown.  Paddling with all swiftness through the
+dark, the three Frenchmen had come to the rushes of Lake St. Peter
+before daybreak.  No Indians could be found.  Men of softer mettle
+might have turned back.  Not so Radisson.  "We were well-armed and had
+a good boat," he relates, "so we resolved to paddle day and night to
+overtake the Indians."  At the west end of the lake they came up with
+the north-bound canoes.  For three days and nights they pushed on
+without rest.  Naturally, Radisson did not pause to report progress at
+Montreal.  Game was so plentiful in the surrounding forests that
+Iroquois hunters were always abroad in the regions of the St. Lawrence
+and Ottawa.[3]  Once they heard guns.  Turning a bend in the river,
+they discovered five Iroquois boats, just in time to avoid them.  That
+night the Frenchman, Larivi�re, dreamed that he had been captured by
+the Mohawks, and he shouted out in such terror that the alarmed Indians
+rushed to embark.  The next day they again came on the trail of
+Iroquois.  The frightened Indians from the Upper Country shouldered
+their canoes and dashed through the woods.  Larivi�re could not keep up
+and was afraid to go back from the river lest he should lose his
+bearings.  Fighting his way over windfall and rock, he sank exhausted
+and fell asleep.  Far ahead of the Iroquois boats the Upper Country
+Indians came together again.  The Frenchman was nowhere to be found.
+It was dark.  The Indians would not wait to search.  Radisson and
+Groseillers dared not turn back to face the irate governor.  Larivi�re
+was abandoned.  Two weeks afterwards some French hunters found him
+lying on the rocks almost dead from starvation.  He was sent back to
+Three Rivers, where D'Avaugour had him imprisoned.  This outrage the
+inhabitants of Three Rivers resented.  They forced the jail and rescued
+Larivi�re.
+
+Three days after the loss of Larivi�re Radisson and Groseillers caught
+up with seven more canoes of Indians from the Upper Country.  The union
+of the two bands was just in time, for the next day they were set upon
+at a _portage_ by the Iroquois.  Ordering the Indians to encase
+themselves in bucklers of matting and buffalo hide, Radisson led the
+assault on the Iroquois barricade.  Trees were cut down, and the Upper
+Indians rushed the rude fort with timbers extemporized into
+battering-rams.  In close range of the enemy, Radisson made a curious
+discovery.  Frenchmen were directing the Iroquois warriors.  Who had
+sent these French to intercept the explorers?  If Radisson suspected
+treachery on the part of jealous rivals from Quebec, it must have
+redoubled his fury; for the Indians from the Upper Country threw
+themselves in the breached barricade with such force that the Iroquois
+lost heart and tossed belts of wampum over the stockades to supplicate
+peace.  It was almost night.  Radisson's Indians drew off to consider
+the terms of peace.  When morning came, behold an empty fort!  The
+French renegades had fled with their Indian allies.
+
+[Illustration: Ch�teau St. Louis, Quebec, 1669, from one of the oldest
+prints in existence.]
+
+Glad to be rid of the first hindrance, the explorers once more sped
+north.  In the afternoon, Radisson's scouts ran full tilt into a band
+of Iroquois laden with beaver pelts.  The Iroquois were smarting from
+their defeat of the previous night; and what was Radisson's amusement
+to see his own scouts and the Iroquois running from each other in equal
+fright, while the ground between lay strewn with booty!  Radisson
+rushed his Indians for the waterside to intercept the Iroquois' flight.
+The Iroquois left their boats and swam for the opposite shore, where
+they threw up the usual barricade and entrenched themselves to shoot on
+Radisson's passing canoes.  Using the captured beaver pelts as shields,
+the Upper Indians ran the gantlet of the Iroquois fire with the loss of
+only one man.
+
+The slightest defeat may turn well-ordered retreat into panic.  If the
+explorers went on, the Iroquois would hang to the rear of the
+travelling Indians and pick off warriors till the Upper Country people
+became so weakened they would fall an easy prey.  Not flight, but
+fight, was Radisson's motto.  He ordered his men ashore to break up the
+barricade.  Darkness fell over the forest.  The Iroquois could not see
+to fire.  "They spared not their powder," relates Radisson, "but they
+made more noise than hurt."  Attaching a fuse to a barrel of powder,
+Radisson threw this over into the Iroquois fort.  The crash of the
+explosion was followed by a blaze of the Iroquois musketry that killed
+three of Radisson's men.  Radisson then tore the bark off a birch tree,
+filled the bole with powder, and in the darkness crept close to the
+Iroquois barricade and set fire to the logs.  Red tongues of fire
+leaped up, there was a roar as of wind, and the Iroquois fort was on
+fire.  Radisson's men dashed through the fire, hatchet in hand.  The
+Iroquois answered with their death chant.  Friend and foe merged in the
+smoke and darkness.  "We could not know one another in that skirmish of
+blows," says Radisson.  "There was noise to terrify the stoutest man."
+In the midst of the m�l�e a frightful storm of thunder and sheeted rain
+rolled over the forest.  "To my mind," writes the disgusted Radisson,
+"that was something extraordinary.  I think the Devil himself sent that
+storm to let those wretches escape, so that they might destroy more
+innocents."  The rain put out the fire.  As soon as the storm had
+passed, Radisson kindled torches to search for the missing.  Three of
+his men were slain, seven wounded.  Of the enemy, eleven lay dead, five
+were prisoners.  The rest of the Iroquois had fled to the forest.  The
+Upper Indians burned their prisoners according to their custom, and the
+night was passed in mad orgies to celebrate the victory.  "The sleep we
+took did not make our heads giddy," writes Radisson.
+
+The next day they encountered more Iroquois.  Both sides at once began
+building forts; but when he could, Radisson always avoided war.  Having
+gained victory enough to hold the Iroquois in check, he wanted no
+massacre.  That night he embarked his men noiselessly; and never once
+stopping to kindle camp-fire, they paddled from Friday night to Tuesday
+morning.  The _portages _over rocks in the dark cut the _voyageurs'_
+moccasins to shreds.  Every landing was marked with the blood of
+bruised feet.  Sometimes they avoided leaving any trace of themselves
+by walking in the stream, dragging their boats along the edge of the
+rapids.  By Tuesday the Indians were so fagged that they could go no
+farther without rest.  Canoes were moored in the hiding of the rushes
+till the _voyageurs_ slept.  They had been twenty-two days going from
+Three Rivers to Lake Nipissing, and had not slept one hour on land.
+
+It was October when they came to Lake Superior.  The forests were
+painted in all the glory of autumn, and game abounded.  White fish
+appeared under the clear, still waters of the lake like shoals of
+floating metal; bears were seen hulking away from the watering places
+of sandy shores; and wild geese whistled overhead.  After the terrible
+dangers of the voyage, with scant sleep and scanter fare, the country
+seemed, as Radisson says, a terrestrial paradise.  The Indians gave
+solemn thanks to their gods of earth and forest, "and we," writes
+Radisson, "to the God of gods."  Indian summer lay on the land.
+November found the explorers coasting the south shore of Lake Superior.
+They passed the Island of Michilimackinac with its stone arches.
+Radisson heard from the Indians of the copper mines.  He saw the
+pictured rocks that were to become famous for beauty.  "I gave it the
+name of St. Peter because that was my name and I was the first
+Christian to see it," he writes of the stone arch.  "There were in
+these places very deep caves, caused by the violence of the waves."
+Jesuits had been on the part of Lake Superior near the Sault, and poor
+M�nard perished in the forests of Lake Michigan; but Radisson and
+Groseillers were the first white men to cruise from south to west and
+west to north, where a chain of lakes and waterways leads from the
+Minnesota lake country to the prairies now known as Manitoba.  Before
+the end of November the explorers rounded the western end of Lake
+Superior and proceeded northwest.  Radisson records that they came to
+great winter encampments of the Crees; and the Crees did not venture
+east for fear of Sautaux and Iroquois.  He mentions a river of
+Sturgeons, where was a great store of fish.
+
+The Crees wished to conduct the two white men to the wooded lake
+region, northwest towards the land of the Assiniboines, where Indian
+families took refuge on islands from those tigers of the plains--the
+Sioux--who were invincible on horseback but less skilful in canoes.
+The rivers were beginning to freeze.  Boats were abandoned; but there
+was no snow for snow-shoe travelling, and the explorers were unable to
+transport the goods brought for trade.  Bidding the Crees go to their
+families and bring back slaves to carry the baggage, Radisson and
+Groseillers built themselves the first fort and the first fur post
+between the Missouri and the North Pole.  It was evidently somewhere
+west of Duluth in either what is now Minnesota or northwestern Ontario.
+
+
+This fur post was the first habitation of civilization in all the Great
+Northwest.  Not the railway, not the cattle trail, not the path of
+forward-marching empire purposely hewing a way through the wilderness,
+opened the West.  It was the fur trade that found the West.  It was the
+fur trade that explored the West.  It was the fur trade that wrested
+the West from savagery.  The beginning was in the little fort built by
+Radisson and Groseillers.  No great factor in human progress ever had a
+more insignificant beginning.
+
+The fort was rushed up by two men almost starving for food.  It was on
+the side of a river, built in the shape of a triangle, with the base at
+the water side.  The walls were of unbarked logs, the roof of thatched
+branches interlaced, with the door at the river side.  In the middle of
+the earth floor, so that the smoke would curl up where the branches
+formed a funnel or chimney, was the fire.  On the right of the fire,
+two hewn logs overlaid with pine boughs made a bed.  On the left,
+another hewn log acted as a table.  Jumbled everywhere, hanging from
+branches and knobs of branches, were the firearms, clothing, and
+merchandise of the two fur traders.  Naturally, a fort two thousand
+miles from help needed sentries.  Radisson had not forgotten his
+boyhood days of Onondaga.  He strung carefully concealed cords through
+the grass and branches around the fort.  To these bells were fastened,
+and the bells were the sentries.  The two white men could now sleep
+soundly without fear of approach.  This fort, from which sprang the
+buoyant, aggressive, prosperous, free life of the Great Northwest, was
+founded and built and completed in two days.
+
+The West had begun.[4]
+
+It was a beginning which every Western pioneer was to repeat for the
+next two hundred years: first, the log cabins; then, the fight with the
+wilderness for food.
+
+Radisson, being the younger, went into the woods to hunt, while
+Groseillers kept house.  Wild geese and ducks were whistling south, but
+"the whistling that I made," writes Radisson, "was another music than
+theirs; for I killed three and scared the rest."  Strange Indians came
+through the forest, but were not admitted to the tiny fort, lest
+knowledge of the traders' weakness should tempt theft.  Many a night
+the explorers were roused by a sudden ringing of the bells or crashing
+through the underbrush, to find that wild animals had been attracted by
+the smell of meat, and wolverine or wildcat was attempting to tear
+through the matted branches of the thatched roof.  The desire for
+firearms has tempted Indians to murder many a trader; so Radisson and
+Groseillers _cached_ all the supplies that they did not need in a hole
+across the river.  News of the two white men alone in the northern
+forest spread like wild-fire to the different Sautaux and Ojibway
+encampments; and Radisson invented another protection in addition to
+the bells.  He rolled gunpowder in twisted tubes of birch bark, and ran
+a circle of this round the fort.  Putting a torch to the birch, he
+surprised the Indians by displaying to them a circle of fire running
+along the ground in a series of jumps.  To the Indians it was magic.
+The two white men were engirt with a mystery that defended them from
+all harm.  Thus white men passed their first winter in the Great
+Northwest.
+
+Toward winter four hundred Crees came to escort the explorers to the
+wooded lake region yet farther west towards the land of the
+Assiniboines, the modern Manitoba.  "We were Caesars," writes Radisson.
+"There was no one to contradict us.  We went away free from any burden,
+while those poor miserables thought themselves happy to carry our
+equipage in the hope of getting a brass ring, or an awl, or a
+needle. . . .  They admired our actions more than the fools of Paris
+their king. . . .[5]  They made a great noise, calling us gods and
+devils.  We marched four days through the woods.  The country was
+beautiful with clear parks.  At last we came within a league of the
+Cree cabins, where we spent the night that we might enter the
+encampment with pomp the next day.  The swiftest Indians ran ahead to
+warn the people of our coming."  Embarking in boats, where the water
+was open, the two explorers came to the Cree lodges.  They were
+welcomed with shouts.  Messengers marched in front, scattering presents
+from the white men,--kettles to call all to a feast of friendship;
+knives to encourage the warriors to be brave; swords to signify that
+the white men would fight all enemies of the Cree; and abundance of
+trinkets--needles and awls and combs and tin mirrors--for the women.
+The Indians prostrated themselves as slaves; and the explorers were
+conducted to a grand council of welcome.  A feast was held, followed by
+a symbolic dance in celebration of the white men's presence.
+
+Their entry to the Great Northwest had been a triumph: but they could
+not escape the privations of the explorer's life.  Winter set in with a
+severity to make up for the long, late autumn.  Snow fell continuously
+till day and night were as one, the sombre forests muffled to silence
+with the wild creatures driven for shelter to secret haunts.  Four
+hundred men had brought the explorers north.  Allowing an average of
+four to each family, there must have been sixteen hundred people in the
+encampment of Crees.  To prevent famine, the Crees scattered to the
+winter hunting-grounds, arranging to come together again in two months
+at a northern rendezvous.  When Radisson and Groseillers came to the
+rendezvous, they learned that the gathering hunters had had poor luck.
+Food was short.  To make matters worse, heavy rains were followed by
+sharp frost.  The snow became iced over, destroying rabbit and grouse,
+which feed the large game.  Radisson noticed that the Indians often
+snatched food from the hands of hungry children.  More starving Crees
+continued to come into camp.  Soon the husbands were taking the wives'
+share of food, and the women were subsisting on dried pelts.  The Crees
+became too weak to carry their snow-shoes, or to gather wood for fire.
+The cries of the dying broke the deathly stillness of the winter
+forest; and the strong began to dog the footsteps of the weak.  "Good
+God, have mercy on these innocent people," writes Radisson; "have mercy
+on us who acknowledge Thee!"  Digging through the snow with their
+rackets, some of the Crees got roots to eat.  Others tore the bark from
+trees and made a kind of soup that kept them alive.  Two weeks after
+the famine set in, the Indians were boiling the pulverized bones of the
+waste heap.  After that the only food was the buckskin that had been
+tanned for clothing.  "We ate it so eagerly," writes Radisson, "that
+our gums did bleed. . . .  We became the image of death."  Before the
+spring five hundred Crees had died of famine.  Radisson and Groseillers
+scarcely had strength to drag the dead from the tepees.  The Indians
+thought that Groseillers had been fed by some fiend, for his heavy,
+black beard covered his thin face.  Radisson they loved, because his
+beardless face looked as gaunt as theirs.[6]
+
+Relief came with the breaking of the weather.  The rain washed the iced
+snows away; deer began to roam; and with the opening of the rivers came
+two messengers from the Sioux to invite Radisson and Groseillers to
+visit their nation.  The two Sioux had a dog, which they refused to
+sell for all Radisson's gifts.  The Crees dared not offend the Sioux
+ambassadors by stealing the worthless cur on which such hungry eyes
+were cast, but at night Radisson slipped up to the Sioux tepee.  The
+dog came prowling out.  Radisson stabbed it so suddenly that it dropped
+without a sound.  Hurrying back, he boiled and fed the meat to the
+famishing Crees.  When the Sioux returned to their own country, they
+sent a score of slaves with food for the starving encampment.  No doubt
+Radisson had plied the first messengers with gifts; for the slaves
+brought word that thirty picked runners from the Sioux were coming to
+escort the white men to the prairie.  To receive their benefactors, and
+also, perhaps, to show that they were not defenceless, the Crees at
+once constructed a fort; for Cree and Sioux had been enemies from time
+immemorial.  In two days came the runners, clad only in short garments,
+and carrying bow and quiver.  The Crees led the young braves to the
+fort.  Kettles were set out.  Fagged from the long run, the Sioux ate
+without a word.  At the end of the meal one rose.  Shooting an arrow
+into the air as a sign that he called Deity to witness the truth of his
+words, he proclaimed in a loud voice that the elders of the Sioux
+nation would arrive next day at the fort to make a treaty with the
+French.
+
+The news was no proof of generosity.  The Sioux were the great warriors
+of the West.  They knew very well that whoever formed an alliance with
+the French would obtain firearms; and firearms meant victory against
+all other tribes.  The news set the Crees by the ears.  Warriors
+hastened from the forests to defend the fort.  The next day came the
+elders of the Sioux in pomp.  They were preceded by the young braves
+bearing bows and arrows and buffalo-skin shields on which were drawn
+figures portraying victories.  Their hair was turned up in a stiff
+crest surmounted by eagle feathers, and their bodies were painted
+bright vermilion.  Behind came the elders, with medicine-bags of
+rattlesnake skin streaming from their shoulders and long strings of
+bears' claws hanging from neck and wrist.  They were dressed in
+buckskin, garnished with porcupine quills, and wore moccasins of
+buffalo hide, with the hair dangling from the heel.  In the belt of
+each was a skull-cracker--a sort of sling stone with a long handle--and
+a war-hatchet.  Each elder carried a peace pipe set with precious
+stones, and stuck in the stem were the quills of the war eagle to
+represent enemies slain.  Women slaves followed, loaded with skins for
+the elders' tents.
+
+[Illustration: A parley on the Plains.]
+
+A great fire had been kindled inside the court of the Cree stockades.
+Round the pavilion the Sioux elders seated themselves.  First, they
+solemnly smoked the calumet of peace.  Then the chief of the Sioux rose
+and chanted a song, giving thanks for their safe journey.  Setting
+aside gifts of rare beaver pelts, he declared that the Sioux had come
+to make friends with the French, who were masters of peace and war;
+that the elders would conduct the white men back to the Sioux country;
+that the mountains were levelled and the valleys cast up, and the way
+made smooth, and branches strewn on the ground for the white men's
+feet, and streams bridged, and the doors of the tepees open.  Let the
+French come to the Sioux!  The Indians would die for the French.  A
+gift was presented to invoke the friendship of the Crees.  Another rich
+gift of furs let out the secret of the Sioux' anxiety: it was that the
+French might give the Sioux "thunder weapons," meaning guns.
+
+The speech being finished, the Crees set a feast before their guests.
+To this feast Radisson and Groseillers came in a style that eclipsed
+the Sioux.  Cree warriors marched in front, carrying guns.  Radisson
+and Groseillers were dressed in armor.[7]  At their belts they wore
+pistol, sword, and dagger.  On their heads were crowns of colored
+porcupine quills.  Two pages carried the dishes and spoons to be used
+at the feast; and four Cree magicians followed with smoking calumets in
+their hands.  Four Indian maids carried bearskins to place on the
+ground when the two explorers deigned to sit down.  Inside the fort
+more than six hundred councillors had assembled.  Outside were gathered
+a thousand spectators.  As Radisson and Groseillers entered, an old
+Cree flung a peace pipe at the explorers' feet and sang a song of
+thanksgiving to the sun that he had lived to see "those terrible men
+whose words (guns) made the earth quake."  Stripping himself of his
+costly furs, he placed them on the white men's shoulders, shouting: "Ye
+are masters over us; dead or alive, dispose of us as you will."
+
+Then Radisson rose and chanted a song, in which he declared that the
+French took the Crees for brethren and would defend them.  To prove his
+words, he threw powder in the fire and had twelve guns shot off, which
+frightened the Sioux almost out of their senses.  A slave girl placed a
+coal in the calumet.  Radisson then presented gifts; the first to
+testify that the French adopted the Sioux for friends; the second as a
+token that the French also took the Crees for friends; the third as a
+sign that the French "would reduce to powder with heavenly fire" any
+one who disturbed the peace between these tribes.  The fourth gift was
+in grateful recognition of the Sioux' courtesy in granting free passage
+through their country.  The gifts consisted of kettles and hatchets and
+awls and needles and looking-glasses and bells and combs and paint, but
+_not_ guns.  Radisson's speech was received with "Ho, ho's" of
+applause.  Sports began.  Radisson offered prizes for racing, jumping,
+shooting with the bow, and climbing a greased post.  All the while,
+musicians were singing and beating the tom-tom, a drum made of buffalo
+hide stretched on hoops and filled with water.
+
+Fourteen days later Radisson and Groseillers set out for the Sioux
+country, or what are now known as the Northwestern states.[8]  On the
+third voyage Radisson came to the Sioux from the south.  On this
+voyage, he came to them from the northeast.  He found that the tribe
+numbered seven thousand men of fighting age.  He remarked that the
+Sioux used a kind of coke or peat for fire instead of wood.  While he
+heard of the tribes that used coal for fire, he does not relate that he
+went to them on this trip.  Again he heard of the mountains far inland,
+where the Indians found copper and lead and a kind of stone that was
+transparent.[9]  He remained six weeks with the Sioux, hunting buffalo
+and deer.  Between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan ran a well-beaten
+trail northeastward, which was used by the Crees and the Sioux in their
+wars.  It is probable that the Sioux escorted Radisson back to the
+Crees by this trail, till he was across what is now the boundary
+between Minnesota and Canada, and could strike directly eastward for
+the Lake of the Woods region, or the hinterland between James Bay and
+Lake Superior.
+
+In spring the Crees went to the Bay of the North, which Radisson was
+seeking; and after leaving the Sioux, the two explorers struck for the
+little fort north of Lake Superior, where they had _cached_ their
+goods.  Spring in the North was later than spring in the South; but the
+shore ice of the Northern lakes had already become soft.  To save time
+they cut across the lakes of Minnesota, dragging their sleighs on the
+ice.  Groseillers' sleigh was loaded with pelts obtained from the
+Sioux, and the elder man began to fag.  Radisson took the heavy sleigh,
+giving Groseillers the lighter one.  About twelve miles out from the
+shore, on one of these lakes, the ice suddenly gave, and Radisson
+plunged through to his waist.  It was as dangerous to turn back as to
+go on.  If they deserted their merchandise, they would have nothing to
+trade with the Indians; but when Radisson succeeded in extricating
+himself, he was so badly strained that he could not go forward another
+step.  There was no sense in risking both their lives on the rotten
+ice.  He urged Groseillers to go on.  Groseillers dared not hesitate.
+Laying two sleds as a wind-break on each side of Radisson, he covered
+the injured man with robes, consigned him to the keeping of God, and
+hurried over the ice to obtain help from the Crees.
+
+The Crees got Radisson ashore, and there he lay in agony for eight
+days.  The Indians were preparing to set out for the North.  They
+invited Radisson to go with them.  His sprain had not healed; but he
+could not miss the opportunity of approaching the Bay of the North.
+For two days he marched with the hunters, enduring torture at every
+step.  The third day he could go no farther and they deserted him.
+Groseillers had gone hunting with another band of Crees.  Radisson had
+neither gun nor hatchet, and the Indians left him only ten pounds of
+pemmican.  After a short rest he journeyed painfully on, following the
+trail of the marching Crees.  On the fifth day he found the frame of a
+deserted wigwam.  Covering it with branches of trees and kindling a
+fire to drive off beasts of prey, he crept in and lay down to sleep.
+He was awakened by a crackling of flame.  The fire had caught the pine
+boughs and the tepee was in a blaze.  Radisson flung his snow-shoes and
+clothing as far as he could, and broke from the fire-trap.
+Half-dressed and lame, shuddering with cold and hunger, he felt through
+the dark over the snow for his clothing.  A far cry rang through the
+forest like the bay of the wolf pack.  Radisson kept solitary watch
+till morning, when he found that the cry came from Indians sent out to
+find him by Groseillers.  He was taken to an encampment, where the
+Crees were building canoes to go to the Bay of the North.
+
+The entire band, with the two explorers, then launched on the rivers
+flowing north.  "We were in danger to perish a thousand times from the
+ice jam," writes Radisson.  ". . .  At last we came full sail from a
+deep bay . . . we came to the seaside, where we found an old house all
+demolished and battered with bullets. . . .  They (the Crees) told us
+about Europeans. . . .  We went from isle to isle all that
+summer. . . .  This region had a great store of cows (caribou). . . .
+We went farther to see the place that the Indians were to pass the
+summer. . . .  The river (where they went) came from the lake that
+empties itself in . . . the Saguenay . . . a hundred leagues from the
+great river of Canada (the St. Lawrence) . . . to where we were in the
+Bay of the North. . . .  We passed the summer quietly coasting the
+seaside. . . .  The people here burn not their prisoners, but knock
+them on the head. . . .  They have a store of turquoise. . . .  They
+find green stones, very fine, at the same Bay of the Sea
+(labradorite). . . .  We went up another river to the Upper Lake
+(Winnipeg)." [10]
+
+For years the dispute has been waged with zeal worthy of a better cause
+whether Radisson referred to Hudson Bay in this passage.  The French
+claim that he did; the English that he did not.  "The house demolished
+with bullets" was probably an old trading post, contend the English;
+but there was no trading post except Radisson's west of Lake Superior
+at that time, retort the French.  By "cows" Radisson meant buffalo, and
+no buffalo were found as far east as Hudson Bay, say the English; by
+"cows" Radisson meant caribou and deer, and herds of these frequented
+the shores of Hudson Bay, answer the French.  No river comes from the
+Saguenay to Hudson Bay, declare the English; yes, but a river comes
+from the direction of the Saguenay, and was followed by subsequent
+explorers, assert the French.[11]  The stones of turquoise and green
+were agates from Lake Superior, explain the English; the stones were
+labradorites from the east coast of the Bay, maintain the French.  So
+the childish quarrel has gone on for two centuries.  England and France
+alike conspired to crush the man while he lived; and when he died they
+quarrelled over the glory of his discoveries.  The point is not whether
+Radisson actually wet his oars in the different indentations of Hudson
+and James bays.  The point is that he found where it lay from the Great
+Lakes, and discovered the watershed sloping north from the Great Lakes
+to Hudson Bay.  This was new ground, and entitled Radisson to the fame
+of a discoverer.
+
+From the Indians of the bay, Radisson heard of another lake leagues to
+the north, whose upper end was always frozen.  This was probably some
+vague story of the lakes in the region that was to become known two
+centuries later as Mackenzie River.  The spring of 1663 found the
+explorers back in the Lake of the Woods region accompanied by seven
+hundred Indians of the Upper Country.  The company filled three hundred
+and sixty canoes.  Indian girls dived into the lake to push the canoes
+off, and stood chanting a song of good-speed till the boats had glided
+out of sight through the long, narrow, rocky gaps of the Lake of the
+Woods.  At Lake Superior the company paused to lay up a supply of
+smoked sturgeon.  At the Sault four hundred Crees turned back.  The
+rest of the Indians hoisted blankets on fishing-poles, and, with a west
+wind, scudded across Lake Huron to Lake Nipissing.  From Lake Nipissing
+they rode safely down the Ottawa to Montreal.  Cannon were fired to
+welcome the discoverers, for New France was again on the verge of
+bankruptcy from a beaver famine.
+
+A different welcome awaited them at Quebec.  D'Argenson, the governor,
+was about to leave for France, and nothing had come of the Jesuit
+expedition up the Saguenay.  He had already sent Couture, for a second
+time, overland to find a way to Hudson Bay; but no word had come from
+Couture, and the governor's time was up.  The explorers had disobeyed
+him in leaving without his permission.  Their return with a fortune of
+pelts was the salvation of the impecunious governor.  From 1627 to 1663
+five distinct fur companies, organized under the patronage of royalty,
+had gone bankrupt in New France.[12]  Therefore, it became a loyal
+governor to protect his Majesty's interests.  Besides, the revenue
+collectors could claim one-fourth of all returns in beaver except from
+posts farmed expressly for the king.  No sooner had Radisson and
+Groseillers come home than D'Argenson ordered Groseillers imprisoned.
+He then fined the explorers $20,000, to build a fort at Three Rivers,
+giving them leave to put their coats-of-arms on the gate; a $30,000
+fine was to go to the public treasury of New France; $70,000 worth of
+beaver was seized as the tax due the revenue.  Of a cargo worth
+$300,000 in modern money, Radisson and Groseillers had less than
+$20,000 left.[13]
+
+Had D'Argenson and his successors encouraged instead of persecuted the
+discoverers, France could have claimed all North America but the narrow
+strip of New England on the east and the Spanish settlements on the
+south.  Having repudiated Radisson and Groseillers, France could not
+claim the fruits of deeds which she punished.[14]
+
+
+[1] The childish dispute whether Bourdon sailed into the bay and up to
+its head, or only to 50 degrees N. latitude, does not concern
+Radisson's life, and, therefore, is ignored.  One thing I can state
+with absolute certainty from having been up the coast of Labrador in a
+most inclement season, that Bourdon could not possibly have gone to and
+back from the inner waters of Hudson Bay between May 2 and August 11.
+J. Edmond Roy and Mr. Sulte both pronounce Bourdon a myth, and his trip
+a fabrication.
+
+[2] "Shame put upon them," says Radisson.  M�nard did _not_ go out with
+Radisson and Groseillers, as is erroneously recorded.
+
+[3] I have purposely avoided stating whether Radisson went by way of
+Lake Ontario or the Ottawa.  Dr. Dionne thinks that he went by Ontario
+and Niagara because Radisson refers to vast waterfalls under which a
+man could walk.  Radisson gives the height of these falls as forty
+feet.  Niagara are nearer three hundred; and the Chaudi�re of the
+Ottawa would answer Radisson's description better, were it not that he
+says a man could go under the falls for a quarter of a mile.  "The Lake
+of the Castors" plainly points to Lake Nipissing.
+
+[4] The two main reasons why I think that Radisson and Groseillers were
+now moving up that chain of lakes and rivers between Minnesota and
+Canada, connecting Lake of the Woods with Lake Winnipeg, are: (1)
+Oldmixon says it was the report of the Assiniboine Indians from Lake
+Assiniboine (Lake Winnipeg) that led Radisson to seek for the Bay of
+the North overland.  These Assiniboines did not go to the bay by way of
+Lake Superior, but by way of Lake Winnipeg.  (2) A m�moire written by
+De la Chesnaye in 1696--see _Documents Nouvelle France_,
+1492-1712--distinctly refers to a _coureur's_ trail from Lake Superior
+to Lake Assiniboine or Lake Winnipeg.  There is no record of any
+Frenchmen but Radisson and Groseillers having followed such a trail to
+the land of the Assiniboines--the Manitoba of to-day--before 1676.
+
+[5] One can guess that a man who wrote in that spirit two centuries
+before the French Revolution would not be a sycophant in
+courts,--which, perhaps, helps to explain the conspiracy of silence
+that obscured Radisson's fame.
+
+[6] My reason for thinking that this region was farther north than
+Minnesota is the size of the Cree winter camp; but I have refrained
+from trying to localize this part of the trip, except to say it was
+west and north of Duluth.  Some writers recognize in the description
+parts of Minnesota, others the hinterland between Lake Superior and
+James Bay.  In the light of the _m�moire_ of 1696 sent to the French
+government, I am unable to regard this itinerary as any other than the
+famous fur traders' trail between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg by
+way of Sturgeon River and the Lake of the Woods.
+
+[7] _Radisson Relations_, p. 207.
+
+[8] We are now on safe ground.  There was a well-known trail from what
+is now known as the Rat Portage region to the great Sioux camps west of
+the Mississippi and Red River valleys.  But again I refuse to lay
+myself open to controversy by trying definitely to give either the
+dates or exact places of this trip.
+
+[9] If any proof is wanted that Radisson's journeyings took him far
+west of the Mississippi, these details afford it.
+
+[10] _Radisson's Journal_, pp. 224, 225, 226.
+
+[11] Mr. A. P. Low, who has made the most thorough exploration of
+Labrador and Hudson Bay of any man living, says, "Rupert River forms
+the discharge of the Mistassini lakes . . . and empties into Rupert Bay
+close to the mouth of the Nottoway River, and rises in a number of
+lakes close to the height of land dividing it from the St. Maurice
+River, which joins the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers."
+
+[12] _Les Compagnies de Colonisation sous l'ancien r�gime_, by
+Chailly-Bert.
+
+[13] Oldmixon says: "Radisson and Groseillers met with some savages on
+the Lake of Assiniboin, and from them they learned that they might go
+by land to the bottom of Hudson's Bay, where the English had not been
+yet, at James Bay; upon which they desired them to conduct them
+thither, and the savages accordingly did it.  They returned to the
+Upper Lake the same way they came, and thence to Quebec, where they
+offered the principal merchants to carry ships to Hudson's Bay; but
+their project was rejected."  Vol. I, p. 548.  Radisson's figures are
+given as "pounds "; but by "_L_" did he mean English "pound" or French
+livre, that is 17 cents?  A franc in 1660 equalled the modern dollar.
+
+[14] The exact tribes mentioned in the _M�moire of 1696_, with whom the
+French were in trade in the West are: On the "Missoury" and south of
+it, the Mascoutins and Sioux; two hundred miles beyond the "Missisipy"
+the Issaguy, the Octbatons, the Omtous, of whom were Sioux capable of
+mustering four thousand warriors, south of Lake Superior, the Sauteurs,
+on "Sipisagny, the river which is the discharge of Lake Asemipigon"
+(Winnipeg), the "Nation of the Grand Rat," Algonquins numbering two
+thousand, who traded with the English of Hudson Bay, De la Chesnaye
+adds in his m�moire details of the trip from Lake Superior to the lake
+of the Assiniboines.  Knowing what close co-workers he and Radisson
+were, we can guess where he got his information.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+1664-1676
+
+RADISSON RENOUNCES ALLEGIANCE TO TWO CROWNS
+
+Rival Traders thwart the Plans of the Discoverers--Entangled in
+Lawsuits, the two French Explorers go to England--The Organization of
+the Hudson's Bay Fur Company--Radisson the Storm-centre of
+International Intrigue--Boston Merchants in the Struggle to capture the
+Fur Trade
+
+
+Henceforth Radisson and Groseillers were men without a country.  Twice
+their return from the North with cargoes of beaver had saved New France
+from ruin.  They had discovered more of America than all the other
+explorers combined.  Their reward was jealous rivalry that reduced them
+to beggary; injustice that compelled them to renounce allegiance to two
+crowns; obloquy during a lifetime; and oblivion for two centuries after
+their death.  The very force of unchecked impulse that carries the hero
+over all obstacles may also carry him over the bounds of caution and
+compromise that regulate the conduct of other men.  This was the case
+with Radisson and Groseillers.  They were powerless to resist the
+extortion of the French governor.  The Company of One Hundred
+Associates had given place to the Company of the West Indies.  This
+trading venture had been organized under the direct patronage of the
+king.[1]  It had been proclaimed from the pulpits of France.
+Privileges were promised to all who subscribed for the stock.  The
+Company was granted a blank list of titles to bestow on its patrons and
+servants.  No one else in New France might engage in the beaver trade;
+no one else might buy skins from the Indians and sell the pelts in
+Europe; and one-fourth of the trade went for public revenue.  In spite
+of all the privileges, fur company after fur company failed in New
+France; but to them Radisson had to sell his furs, and when the revenue
+officers went over the cargo, the minions of the governor also seized a
+share under pretence of a fine for trading without a license.
+
+Groseillers was furious, and sailed for France to demand restitution;
+but the intriguing courtiers proved too strong for him.  Though he
+spent 10,000 pounds, nothing was done.  D'Avaugour had come back to
+France, and stockholders of the jealous fur company were all-powerful
+at court.  Groseillers then relinquished all idea of restitution, and
+tried to interest merchants in another expedition to Hudson Bay by way
+of the sea.[2]  He might have spared himself the trouble.  His
+enthusiasm only aroused the quiet smile of supercilious indifference.
+His plans were regarded as chimerical.  Finally a merchant of Rochelle
+half promised to send a boat to Isle Perc�e at the mouth of the St.
+Lawrence in 1664.  Groseillers had already wasted six months.  Eager
+for action, he hurried back to Three Rivers, where Radisson awaited
+him.  The two secretly took passage in a fishing schooner to Anticosti,
+and from Anticosti went south to Isle Perc�e.  Here a Jesuit just out
+from France bore the message to them that no ship would come.  The
+promise had been a put-off to rid France of the enthusiast.  New France
+had treated them with injustice.  Old France with mockery.  Which way
+should they turn?  They could not go back to Three Rivers.  This
+attempt to go to Hudson Bay without a license laid them open to a
+second fine.  Baffled, but not beaten, the explorers did what
+ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done in similar
+circumstances--they left the country.  Some rumor of their intention to
+abandon New France must have gone abroad; for when they reached Cape
+Breton, their servants grumbled so loudly that a mob of Frenchmen
+threatened to burn the explorers.  Dismissing their servants, Radisson
+and Groseillers escaped to Port Royal, Nova Scotia.
+
+[Illustration: Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three
+Rivers.]
+
+In Port Royal they met a sea-captain from Boston, Zechariah Gillam, who
+offered his ship for a voyage to Hudson Bay, but the season was far
+spent when they set out.  Captain Gillam was afraid to enter the
+ice-locked bay so late in summer.  The boat turned back, and the trip
+was a loss.  This run of ill-luck had now lasted for a year.  They
+still had some money from the Northern trips, and they signed a
+contract with ship-owners of Boston to take two vessels to Hudson Bay
+the following spring.  Provisions must be laid up for the long voyage.
+One of the ships was sent to the Grand Banks for fish.  Rounding
+eastward past the crescent reefs of Sable Island, the ship was caught
+by the beach-combers and totally wrecked on the drifts of sand.
+Instead of sailing for Hudson Bay in the spring of 1665, Radisson and
+Groseillers were summoned to Boston to defend themselves in a lawsuit
+for the value of the lost vessel.  They were acquitted; but lawsuits on
+the heels of misfortune exhausted the resources of the adventurers.
+The exploits of the two Frenchmen had become the sensation of Boston.
+Sir Robert Carr, one of the British commissioners then in the New
+England colonies, urged Radisson and Groseillers to renounce allegiance
+to a country that had shown only ingratitude, and to come to
+England.[3]  When Sir George Cartwright sailed from Nantucket on August
+1, 1665, he was accompanied by Radisson and Groseillers.[4]  Misfortune
+continued to dog them.  Within a few days' sail of England, their ship
+encountered the Dutch cruiser _Caper_.  For two hours the ships poured
+broadsides of shot into each other's hulls.  The masts were torn from
+the English vessel.  She was boarded and stripped, and the Frenchmen
+were thoroughly questioned.  Then the captives were all landed in
+Spain.  Accompanied by the two Frenchmen, Sir George Cartwright
+hastened to England early in 1666.  The plague had driven the court
+from London to Oxford.  Cartwright laid the plans of the explorers
+before Charles II.  The king ordered 40s. a week paid to Radisson and
+Groseillers for the winter.  They took chambers in London.  Later they
+followed the court to Windsor, where they were received by King Charles.
+
+The English court favored the project of trade in Hudson Bay, but
+during the Dutch war nothing could be done.  The captain of the Dutch
+ship _Caper_ had sent word of the French explorers to De Witt, the
+great statesman.  De Witt despatched a spy from Picardy, France, one
+Eli Godefroy Touret, who chanced to know Groseillers, to meet the
+explorers in London.  Masking as Groseillers' nephew, Touret tried to
+bribe both men to join the Dutch.  Failing this, he attempted to
+undermine their credit with the English by accusing Radisson and
+Groseillers of counterfeiting money; but the English court refused to
+be deceived, and Touret was imprisoned.  Owing to the plague and the
+war, two years passed without the vague promises of the English court
+taking shape.  Montague, the English ambassador to France, heard of the
+explorers' feats, and wrote to Prince Rupert.  Prince Rupert was a
+soldier of fortune, who could enter into the spirit of the explorers.
+He had fought on the losing side against Cromwell, and then taken to
+the high seas to replenish broken fortunes by piracy.  The wealth of
+the beaver trade appealed to him.  He gave all the influence of his
+_prestige_ to the explorers' plans.  By the spring of 1668 money enough
+had been advanced to fit out two boats for Hudson Bay.  In the _Eagle_,
+with Captain Stannard, went Radisson; in the _Nonsuch_, with Captain
+Zechariah Gillam of Boston, went Groseillers.  North of Ireland furious
+gales drove the ships apart.  Radisson's vessel was damaged and driven
+back to London; but his year was not wasted.  It is likely that the
+account of his first voyages was written while Groseillers was away.[5]
+Sometime during his stay in London he married Mary Kirke, a daughter of
+the Huguenot John Kirke, whose family had long ago gone from Boston and
+captured Quebec.
+
+Gillam's journal records that the _Nonsuch_ left Gravesend the 3d of
+June, 1668, reached Resolution Island on August 4, and came to anchor
+at the south of James Bay on September 29.[6]  It was here that
+Radisson had come overland five years before, when he thought that he
+discovered a river flowing from the direction of the St. Lawrence.  The
+river was Nemisco.  Groseillers called it Rupert in honor of his
+patron.  A palisaded fort was at once built, and named King Charles
+after the English monarch.  By December, the bay was locked in the
+deathly silence of northern frost.  Snow fell till the air became
+darkened day after day, a ceaseless fall of muffling snow; the
+earth--as Gillam's journal says--"seemed frozen to death."  Gillam
+attended to the fort, Groseillers to the trade.  Dual command was bound
+to cause a clash.  By April, 1669, the terrible cold had relaxed.  The
+ice swept out of the river with a roar.  Wild fowl came winging north
+in myriad flocks.  By June the fort was sweltering in almost tropical
+heat.  The _Nonsuch_ hoisted anchor and sailed for England, loaded to
+the water-line with a cargo of furs.  Honors awaited Groseillers in
+London.  King Charles created him a _Knight de la Jarreti�re_, an order
+for princes of the royal blood.[7]  In addition, he was granted a sum
+of money.  Prince Rupert and Radisson had, meanwhile, been busy
+organizing a fur company.  The success of Groseillers' voyage now
+assured this company a royal charter, which was granted in May, 1670.
+Such was the origin of the Hudson's Bay Company.  Prince Rupert was its
+first governor; Charles Bayly was appointed resident governor on the
+bay.  Among the first shareholders were Prince Rupert, the Duke of
+York, Sir George Cartwright, the Duke of Albermarle, Shaftesbury, Sir
+Peter Colleton, who had advanced Radisson a loan during the long period
+of waiting, and Sir John Kirke, whose daughter had married Radisson.
+
+That spring, Radisson and Groseillers again sailed for the bay.  In
+1671, three ships were sent out from England, and Radisson established
+a second post westward at Moose.  With Governor Bayly, he sailed up and
+met the Indians at what was to become the great fur capital of the
+north, Port Nelson, or York.  The third year of the company's
+existence, Radisson and Groseillers perceived a change.  Not so many
+Indians came down to the English forts to trade.  Those who came brought
+fewer pelts and demanded higher prices.  Rivals had been at work.  The
+English learned that the French had come overland and were paying high
+prices to draw the Indians from the bay.  In the spring a council was
+held.[8]  Should they continue on the east side of the bay, or move
+west, where there would be no rivalry?  Groseillers boldly counselled
+moving inland and driving off French competition.  Bayly was for moving
+west.  He even hinted that Groseillers' advice sprang from disloyalty
+to the English.  The clash that was inevitable from divided command was
+this time avoided by compromise.  They would all sail west, and all
+come back to Rupert's River.  When they returned, they found that the
+English ensign had been torn down and the French flag raised.[9]  A
+veteran Jesuit missionary of the Saguenay, Charles Albanel, two French
+companions, and some Indian guides had ensconced themselves in the
+empty houses.[10]  The priest now presented Governor Bayly with letters
+from Count Frontenac commending the French to the good offices of
+Governor Bayly.[11]
+
+France had not been idle.
+
+When it was too late, the country awakened to the injustice done
+Radisson and Groseillers.  While Radisson was still in Boston, all
+restrictions were taken from the beaver trade, except the tax of
+one-fourth to the revenue.  The Jesuit Dablon, who was near the western
+end of Lake Superior, gathered all the information he could from the
+Indians of the way to the Sea of the North.  Father Marquette learned
+of the Mississippi from the Indians.  The Western tribes had been
+summoned to the Sault, where Sieur de Saint-Lusson met them in treaty
+for the French; and the French flag was raised in the presence of P�re
+Claude Allouez, who blessed the ceremony.  M. Colbert sent instructions
+to M. Talon, the intendant of New France, to grant titles of nobility
+to Groseillers' nephew in order to keep him in the country.[12]  On the
+Saguenay was a Jesuit, Charles Albanel, loyal to the French and of
+English birth, whose devotion to the Indians during the small-pox
+scourge of 1670 had given him unbounded influence.  Talon, the
+intendant of New France, was keen to retrieve in the North what
+D'Argenson's injustice had lost.  Who could be better qualified to go
+overland to Hudson Bay than the old missionary, loyal to France, of
+English birth, and beloved by the Indians?  Albanel was summoned to
+Quebec and gladly accepted the commission.  He chose for companions
+Saint-Simon and young Couture, the son of the famous guide to the
+Jesuits.  The company left Quebec on August 6, 1671, and secured a
+guide at Tadoussac.  Embarking in canoes, they ascended the shadowy
+ca�on of the Saguenay to Lake St. John.  On the 7th of September they
+left the forest of Lake St. John and mounted the current of a winding
+river, full of cataracts and rapids, toward Mistassini.  On this stream
+they met Indians who told them that two European vessels were on Hudson
+Bay.  The Indians showed Albanel tobacco which they had received from
+the English.
+
+It seemed futile to go on a voyage of discovery where English were
+already in possession.  The priest sent one of the Frenchmen and two
+Indians back to Quebec for passports and instructions.  What the
+instructions were can only be guessed by subsequent developments.  The
+messengers left the depth of the forest on the 19th of September, and
+had returned from Quebec by the 10th of October.  Snow was falling.
+The streams had frozen, and the Indians had gone into camp for the
+winter.  Going from wigwam to wigwam through the drifted forest. Father
+Albanel passed the winter preaching to the savages.  Skins of the chase
+were laid on the wigwams.  Against the pelts, snow was banked to close
+up every chink.  Inside, the air was blue with smoke and the steam of
+the simmering kettle.  Indian hunters lay on the moss floor round the
+central fires.  Children and dogs crouched heterogeneously against the
+sloping tent walls.  Squaws plodded through the forest, setting traps
+and baiting the fish-lines that hung through airholes of the thick ice.
+In these lodges Albanel wintered.  He was among strange Indians and
+suffered incredible hardships.  Where there was room, he, too, sat
+crouched under the crowded tent walls, scoffed at by the braves, teased
+by the unrebuked children, eating when the squaws threw waste food to
+him, going hungry when his French companions failed to bring in game.
+Sometimes night overtook him on the trail.  Shovelling a bed through
+the snow to the moss with his snow-shoes, piling shrubs as a
+wind-break, and kindling a roaring fire, the priest passed the night
+under the stars.
+
+When spring came, the Indians opposed his passage down the river.  A
+council was called.  Albanel explained that his message was to bring
+the Indians down to Quebec and keep them from going to the English for
+trade.  The Indians, who had acted as middlemen between Quebec traders
+and the Northern tribes, saw the advantage of undermining the English
+trade.  Gifts were presented by the Frenchmen, and the friendship of
+the Indians was secured.  On June 1, 1672, sixteen savages embarked
+with the three Frenchmen.  For the next ten days, the difficulties were
+almost insurmountable.  The river tore through a deep gorge of sheer
+precipices which the _voyageurs_ could pass only by clinging to the
+rock walls with hands and feet.  One _portage_ was twelve miles long
+over a muskeg of quaking moss that floated on water.  At every step the
+travellers plunged through to their waists.  Over this the long canoes
+and baggage had to be carried.  On the 10th of June they reached the
+height of land that divides the waters of Hudson Bay from the St.
+Lawrence.  The watershed was a small plateau with two lakes, one of
+which emptied north, the other, south.  As they approached Lake
+Mistassini, the Lake Indians again opposed their free passage down the
+rivers.
+
+"You must wait," they said, "till we notify the elders of your coming."
+Shortly afterwards, the French met a score of canoes with the Indians
+all painted for war.  The idea of turning back never occurred to the
+priest.  By way of demonstrating his joy at meeting the warriors, he
+had ten volleys of musketry fired off, which converted the war into a
+council of peace.  At the assemblage, Albanel distributed gifts to the
+savages.
+
+"Stop trading with the English at the sea," he cried; "they do not pray
+to God; come to Lake St. John with your furs; there you will always
+find a _robe noire_ to instruct you and baptize you."
+
+The treaty was celebrated by a festival and a dance.  In the morning,
+after solemn religious services, the French embarked.  On the 18th of
+June they came to Lake Mistassini, an enormous body of water similar to
+the Great Lakes.[13]  From Mistassini, the course was down-stream and
+easier.  High water enabled them to run many of the rapids; and on the
+28th of June, after a voyage of eight hundred leagues, four hundred
+rapids, and two hundred waterfalls, they came to the deserted houses of
+the English.  The very next day they found the Indians and held
+religious services, making solemn treaty, presenting presents, and
+hoisting the French flag.  For the first three weeks of July they
+coasted along the shores of James Bay, taking possession of the country
+in the name of the French king.  Then they cruised back to King Charles
+Fort on Rupert's River.[14]  They were just in time to meet the
+returned Englishmen.
+
+Governor Bayly of the Hudson's Bay Company was astounded to find the
+French at Rupert's River.  Now he knew what had allured the Indians
+from the bay, but he hardly relished finding foreigners in possession
+of his own fort.  The situation required delicate tact.  Governor Bayly
+was a bluff tradesman with an insular dislike of Frenchmen and
+Catholics common in England at a time when bigoted fanaticism ran riot.
+King Charles was on friendly terms with France.  Therefore, the
+Jesuit's passport must be respected; so Albanel was received with at
+least a show of courtesy.  But Bayly was the governor of a fur company;
+and the rights of the company must be respected.  To make matters
+worse, the French voyageurs brought letters to Groseillers and Radisson
+from their relatives in Quebec.  Bayly, no doubt, wished the Jesuit
+guest far enough.  Albanel left in a few weeks.  Then Bayly's
+suspicions blazed out in open accusations that the two French explorers
+had been playing a double game and acting against English interests.
+In September came the company ship to the fort with Captain Gillam, who
+had never agreed with Radisson from the time that they had quarrelled
+about going from Port Royal to the straits of Hudson Bay.  It has been
+said that, at this stage, Radisson and Groseillers, feeling the
+prejudice too strong against them, deserted and passed overland through
+the forests to Quebec.  The records of the Hudson's Bay Company do not
+corroborate this report.  Bayly in the heat of his wrath sent home
+accusations with the returning ship.  The ship that came out in 1674
+requested Radisson to go to England and report.  This he did, and so
+completely refuted the charges of disloyalty that in 1675 the company
+voted him 100 pounds a year; but Radisson would not sit quietly in
+England on a pension.  Owing to hostility toward him among the English
+employees of the company, he could not go back to the bay.  Meantime he
+had wife and family and servants to maintain on 100 pounds a year.  If
+England had no more need of him, France realized the fact that she had.
+Debts were accumulating.  Restless as a caged tiger, Radisson found
+himself baffled until a message came from the great Colbert of France,
+offering to pay all his debts and give him a position in the French
+navy.  His pardon was signed and proclaimed.  In 1676, France granted
+him fishing privileges on the island of Anticosti; but the lodestar of
+the fur trade still drew him, for that year he was called to Quebec to
+meet a company of traders conferring on the price of beaver.[15]  In
+that meeting assembled, among others, Jolliet, La Salle, Groseillers,
+and Radisson--men whose names were to become immortal.
+
+It was plain that the two adventurers could not long rest.[16]
+
+
+[1] Chailly-Bert.
+
+[2] The Jesuit expeditions of Dablon and Dreuillettes in 1661 had
+failed to reach the bay overland.  Cabot had coasted Labrador in 1497;
+Captain Davis had gone north of Hudson Bay in 1585-1587; Hudson had
+lost his life there in 1610.  Sir Thomas Button had explored Baffin's
+Land, Nelson River, and the Button Islands in 1612; Munck, the Dane,
+had found the mouth of the Churchill River in 1619, James and Fox had
+explored the inland sea in 1631; Shapley had brought a ship up from
+Boston in 1640; and Bourdon, the Frenchman, had gone up to the straits
+in 1656-1657.
+
+[3] George Carr, writing to Lord Arlington on December 14, 1665, says:
+"Hearing some Frenchmen discourse in New England . . . of a great trade
+of beaver, and afterward making proof of what they had said, he thought
+them the best present he could possibly make his Majesty and persuaded
+them to come to England."
+
+[4] Colonel Richard Nicolls, writing on July 31, 1665, says he
+"supposes Col. Geo. Cartwright is now at sea."
+
+[5] It plainly could not have been written while _en route_ across the
+Atlantic with Sir George Cartwright, for it records events after that
+time.
+
+[6] Robson's _Hudson Bay_.
+
+[7] See Dr. N. E. Dionne, also Marie de l'Incarnation, but Sulte
+discredits this granting of a title.
+
+[8] See Robson's _Hudson Bay_, containing reference to the journal kept
+by Gorst, Bayly's secretary, at Rupert Fort.
+
+[9] See State Papers, Canadian Archives, 1676, January 26, Whitehall:
+Memorial of the Hudson Bay Company complaining of Albanel, a Jesuit,
+attempting to seduce Radisson and Groseillers from the company's
+services; in absence of ships pulling down the British ensign and
+tampering with the Indians.
+
+[10] I am inclined to think that Albanel may not have been aware of the
+documents which he carried from Quebec to the traders being practically
+an offer to bribe Radisson and Groseillers to desert England.  Some
+accounts say that Albanel was accompanied by Groseillers' son, but I
+find no authority for this.  On the other hand, Albanel does not
+mention the Englishmen being present.  Just as Radisson and
+Groseillers, ten years before, had taken possession of the old house
+battered with bullets, so Albanel took possession of the deserted huts.
+Here is what his account says (Cramoisy edition of the _Relations_):
+"Le 28 June � peine avions nous avanc� un quart de lieue, que nous
+rencontrasmes � main gauche dans un petit ruisseau un heu avec ses
+agrez de dix ou dou tonneaux, qui portoit le Pavilion Anglois et la
+voile latine; del� � la port�e du fusil, nous entrasmes dans deux
+maisons desertes . . . nous rencontrasmes deux ou trois cabanes et un
+chien abandonn�. . . ."  His tampering with the Indians was simply the
+presentation of gifts to attract them to Quebec.
+
+[11] See State Papers, Canadian Archives: M. Frontenac, the commander
+of French (?) king's troops at Hudson Bay, introduces and recommends
+Father Albanel.
+
+[12] State Papers, Canadian Archives.
+
+[13] For some years there were sensational reports that Mistassini was
+larger than Lake Superior.  Mr. Low, of the Canadian Geological Survey,
+in a very exhaustive report, shows this is not so.  Still, the lake
+ranks with the large lakes of America.  Mr. Low gives its dimensions as
+one hundred miles long and twelve miles wide.
+
+[14] There is a discrepancy in dates here which I leave savants to
+worry out.  _Albanel's Relation_ (Cramoisy) is of 1672.  Thomas Gorst,
+secretary to Governor Bayly, says that the quarrel took place in 1674.
+Oldmixon, who wrote from hearsay, says in 1673.  Robson, who had access
+to Hudson's Bay records, says 1676; and I am inclined to think they all
+agree.  In a word, Radisson and Groseillers were on bad terms with the
+local Hudson's Bay Company governor from the first, and the open
+quarrel took place only in 1675.  Considering the bigotry of the times,
+the quarrel was only natural.  Bayly was governor, but he could not
+take precedence over Radisson and Groseillers.  He was Protestant and
+English.  They were Catholics and French.  Besides, they were really at
+the English governor's mercy; for they could not go back to Canada
+until publicly pardoned by the French king.
+
+[15] State Papers, Canadian Archives, October 20, 1676, Quebec: Report
+of proceedings regarding the price of beaver . . . by an ordinance,
+October 19, 1676, M. Jacques Duchesneau, Intendant, had called a
+meeting of the leading fur traders to consult about fixing the price of
+beaver.  There were present, among others, Robert, Cavelier de la
+Salle, . . . Charles le Moyne, . . . two Godefroys of Three
+Rivers, . . . Groseillers, . . . Jolliet, . . . Pierre Radisson.
+
+[16] Mr. Low's geological report on Labrador contains interesting
+particulars of the route followed by Father Albanel.  He speaks of the
+gorge and swamps and difficult _portages_ in precisely the same way as
+the priest, though Albanel must have encountered the worst possible
+difficulties on the route, for he went down so early in the spring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+1682-1684
+
+RADISSON GIVES UP A CAREER IN THE NAVY FOR THE FUR TRADE
+
+Though opposed by the Monopolists of Quebec, he secures Ships for a
+Voyage to Hudson Bay--Here he encounters a Pirate Ship from Boston and
+an English Ship of the Hudson's Bay Company--How he plays his Cards to
+win against Both Rivals
+
+
+A clever man may be a dangerous rival.  Both France and England
+recognized this in Radisson.  The Hudson's Bay Company distrusted him
+because he was a foreigner.  The fur traders of Quebec were jealous.
+The Hudson's Bay Company had offered him a pension of 100 pounds a year
+to do nothing.  France had pardoned his secession to England, paid his
+debts, and given him a position in the navy, and when the fleet was
+wrecked returning from the campaign against Dutch possessions in the
+West Indies, the French king advanced money for Radisson to refit
+himself; but France distrusted the explorer because he had an English
+wife.  All that France and England wanted Radisson to do was to keep
+quiet.  What the haughty spirit of Radisson would _not_ do for all the
+fortunes which two nations could offer to bribe him--was to keep quiet.
+He cared more for the game than the winnings; and the game of sitting
+still and drawing a pension for doing nothing was altogether too tame
+for Radisson.  Groseillers gave up the struggle and retired for the
+time to his family at Three Rivers.  At Quebec, in 1676, Radisson heard
+of others everywhere reaping where he had sown.  Jolliet and La Salle
+were preparing to push the fur trade of New France westward of the
+Great Lakes, where Radisson had penetrated twenty years previously.
+Fur traders of Quebec, who organized under the name of the Company of
+the North, yearly sent their canoes up the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and
+Saguenay to the forests south of Hudson Bay, which Radisson had
+traversed.  On the bay itself the English company were entrenched.
+North, northwest, and west, Radisson had been the explorer; but the
+reward of his labor had been snatched by other hands.
+
+[Illustration: "Skin for Skin," Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay
+Company.]
+
+Radisson must have served meritoriously on the fleet, for after the
+wreck he was offered the command of a man-of-war; but he asked for a
+commission to New France.  From this request there arose complications.
+His wife's family, the Kirkes, had held claims against New France from
+the days when the Kirkes of Boston had captured Quebec.  These claims
+now amounted to 40,000 pounds.  M. Colbert, the great French statesman,
+hesitated to give a commission to a man allied by marriage with the
+enemies of New France.  Radisson at last learned why preferment had
+been denied him.  It was on account of his wife.  Twice Radisson
+journeyed to London for Mary Kirke.  Those were times of an easy change
+in faith.  Charles II was playing double with Catholics and
+Protestants.  The Kirkes were closely attached to the court; and it
+was, perhaps, not difficult for the Huguenot wife to abjure
+Protestantism and declare herself a convert to the religion of her
+husband.  But when Radisson proposed taking her back to France, that
+was another matter.  Sir John Kirke forbade his daughter's departure
+till the claims of the Kirke family against New France had been paid.
+When Radisson returned without his wife, he was reproached by M.
+Colbert for disloyalty.  The government refused its patronage to his
+plans for the fur trade; but M. Colbert sent him to confer with La
+Chesnaye, a prominent fur trader and member of the Council in New
+France, who happened to be in Paris at that time.  La Chesnaye had been
+sent out to Canada to look after the affairs of a Rouen fur-trading
+company.  Soon he became a commissioner of the West Indies Company; and
+when the merchants of Quebec organized the Company of the North, La
+Chesnaye became a director.  No one knew better than he how bitterly
+the monopolists of Quebec would oppose Radisson's plans for a trip to
+Hudson Bay; but the prospects were alluring.  La Chesnaye was deeply
+involved in the fur trade and snatched at the chance of profits to
+stave off the bankruptcy that reduced him to beggary a few years later.
+In defiance of the rival companies and independent of those with which
+he was connected, he offered to furnish ships and share profits with
+Radisson and Groseillers for a voyage to Hudson Bay.
+
+M. Colbert did not give his patronage to the scheme; but he wished
+Radisson a God-speed.  The Jesuits advanced Radisson money to pay his
+passage; and in the fall of 1681, he arrived in Quebec.  La Chesnaye
+met him, and Groseillers was summoned.  The three then went to the
+Ch�teau Saint-Louis to lay their plans before the governor.  Though the
+privileges of the West Indies Company had been curtailed, the fur trade
+was again regulated by license.[1]  Frontenac had granted a license to
+the Company of the North for the fur trade of Hudson Bay.  He could not
+openly favor Radisson; but he winked at the expedition by granting
+passports to the explorers, and the three men who were to accompany
+him, Jean Baptiste, son of Groseillers, Pierre Allemand, the pilot who
+was afterward given a commission to explore the Eskimo country, and
+Jean Godefroy, an interpreter.[2]  Jean Baptiste, Radisson's nephew,
+invested 500 pounds in goods for barter.  Others of Three Rivers and
+Quebec advanced money, to provision the ship.[3]  Ten days after
+Radisson's arrival in Quebec, the explorers had left the high fortress
+of the St. Lawrence to winter in Acadia.  When spring came, they went
+with the fishing fleets to Isle Perc�e, where La Chesnaye was to send
+the ships.  Radisson's ship, the _St. Pierre_,--named after
+himself,--came first, a rickety sloop of fifty tons with a crew of
+twelve mutinous, ill-fed men, a cargo of goods for barter, and scant
+enough supply of provisions.  Groseillers' ship, the _St. Anne_, was
+smaller and better built, with a crew of fifteen.  The explorers set
+sail on the 11th of July.  From the first there was trouble with the
+crews.  Fresh-water _voyageurs_ make bad ocean sailors.  Food was
+short.  The voyage was to be long.  It was to unknown waters, famous
+for disaster.  The sea was boisterous.  In the months of June and July,
+the North Atlantic is beset with fog and iceberg.  The ice sweeps south
+in mountainous bergs that have thawed and split before they reach the
+temperate zones.[4]  On the 30th of July the two ships passed the
+Straits of Belle Isle.  Fog-banks hung heavy on the blue of the far
+watery horizon.  Out of the fog, like ghosts in gloom, drifted the
+shadowy ice-floes.  The coast of Labrador consists of bare, domed,
+lonely hills alternated with rock walls rising sheer from the sea as
+some giant masonry.  Here the rock is buttressed by a sharp angle
+knife-edged in a precipice.  There, the beetling walls are guarded by
+long reefs like the teeth of a saw.  Over these reefs, the drifting
+tide breaks with multitudinous voices.  The French _voyageurs_ had
+never known such seafaring.  In the wail of the white-foamed reefs,
+their superstition heard the shriek of the demons.  The explorers had
+anchored in one of the sheltered harbors, which the sailors call
+"holes-in-the-wall."  The crews mutinied.  They would go no farther
+through ice-drift and fog to an unknown sea.  Radisson never waited for
+the contagion of fear to work.  He ordered anchors up and headed for
+open sea.  Then he tried to encourage the sailors with promises.  They
+would not hear him; for the ship's galley was nearly empty of food.
+Then Radisson threatened the first mutineer to show rebellion with such
+severe punishment as the hard customs of the age permitted.  The crew
+sulked, biding its time.  At that moment the lookout shouted "Sail ho!"
+
+All hands discerned a ship with a strange sail, such as Dutch and
+Spanish pirates carried, bearing down upon them shoreward.  The lesser
+fear was forgotten in the greater.  The _St. Pierre's_ crew crowded
+sail.  Heading about, the two explorers' ships threaded the rock reefs
+like pursued deer.  The pirate came on full speed before the wind.
+Night fell while Radisson was still hiding among the rocks.
+Notwithstanding reefs and high seas, while the pirate ship hove to for
+the night, Radisson stole out in the dark and gave his pursuer the
+slip.  The chase had saved him a mutiny.
+
+As the vessels drove northward, the ice drifted past like a white world
+afloat.  When Radisson approached the entrance to Hudson Bay, he met
+floes in impenetrable masses.  So far the ships had avoided delay by
+tacking along the edges of the ice-fields, from lake to lake of ocean
+surrounded by ice.  Now the ice began to crush together, driven by wind
+and tide with furious enough force to snap the two ships like
+egg-shells.  Radisson watched for a free passage, and, with a wind to
+rear, scudded for shelter of a hole-in-the-wall.  Here he met the
+Eskimo, and provisions were replenished; but the dangers of the
+ice-fields had frightened the crews again.  In two days Radisson put to
+sea to avoid a second mutiny.  The wind was landward, driving the ice
+back from the straits, and they passed safely into Hudson Bay.  The ice
+again surrounded them; but it was useless for the men to mutiny.  Ice
+blocked up all retreat.  Jammed among the floes, Groseillers was afraid
+to carry sail, and fell behind.  Radisson drove ahead, now skirting the
+ice-floes, now pounded by breaking icebergs, now crashing into surface
+brash or puddled ice to the fore.  "We were like to have perished," he
+writes, "but God was pleased to preserve us."
+
+On the 26th of August, six weeks after sailing from Isle Perc�e,
+Radisson rode triumphantly in on the tide to Hayes River, south of
+Nelson River, where he had been with the English ships ten years
+before.  Two weeks later the _Ste. Anne_, with Groseillers, arrived.
+The two ships cautiously ascended the river, seeking a harbor.  Fifteen
+miles from salt water, Radisson anchored.  At last he was back in his
+native element, the wilderness, where man must set himself to conquer
+and take dominion over earth.
+
+Groseillers was always the trader, Radisson the explorer.  Leaving his
+brother-in-law to build the fort, Radisson launched a canoe on Hayes
+River to explore inland.  Young Jean Groseillers accompanied him to
+look after the trade with the Indians.[5]  For eight days they paddled
+up a river that was destined to be the path of countless traders and
+pioneers for two centuries, and that may yet be destined to become the
+path of a northern commerce.  By September the floodtide of Hayes River
+had subsided.  In a week the _voyageurs_ had travelled probably three
+hundred miles, and were within the region of Lake Winnipeg, where the
+Cree hunters assemble in October for the winter.  Radisson had come to
+this region by way of Lake Superior with the Cree hunters twenty years
+before, and his visit had become a tradition among the tribes.  Beaver
+are busy in October gnawing down young saplings for winter food.
+Radisson observed chips floating past the canoe.  Where there are
+beaver, there should be Indians; so the _voyageurs_ paddled on.  One
+night, as they lay round the camp-fire, with canoes overturned, a deer,
+startled from its evening drinking-place, bounded from the thicket.  A
+sharp whistle--and an Indian ran from the brush of an island opposite
+the camp, signalling the white men to head the deer back; but when
+Radisson called from the waterside, the savage took fright and dashed
+for the woods.
+
+All that night the _voyageurs_ kept sleepless guard.  In the morning
+they moved to the island and kindled a signal-fire to call the Indians.
+In a little while canoes cautiously skirted the island, and the chief
+of the band stood up, bow and arrow in hand.  Pointing his arrows to
+the deities of north, south, east, and west, he broke the shaft to
+splinters, as a signal of peace, and chanted his welcome:--
+
+  "Ho, young men, be not afraid!
+  The sun is favorable to us!
+  Our enemies shall fear us!
+  This is the man we have wished
+  Since the days of our fathers!"
+
+
+With a leap, the chief sprang into the water and swam ashore, followed
+by all the canoes.  Radisson called out to know who was commander.  The
+chief, with a sign as old and universal as humanity, bowed his head in
+servility.  Radisson took the Indian by the hand, and, seating him by
+the fire, chanted an answer in Cree:--
+
+  "I know all the earth!
+  Your friends shall be my friends!
+  I come to bring you arms to destroy your enemies!
+  Nor wife nor child shall die of hunger!
+  For I have brought you merchandise!
+  Be of good cheer!
+  I will be thy son!
+  I have brought thee a father!
+  He is yonder below building a fort
+  Where I have two great ships!" [6]
+
+
+The chief kept pace with the profuse compliments by vowing the life of
+his tribe in service of the white man.  Radisson presented pipes and
+tobacco to the Indians.  For the chief he reserved a fowling-piece with
+powder and shot.  White man and Indian then exchanged blankets.
+Presents were sent for the absent wives.  The savages were so grateful
+that they cast all their furs at Radisson's feet, and promised to bring
+their hunt to the fort in spring.  In Paris and London Radisson had
+been harassed by jealousy.  In the wilderness he was master of
+circumstance; but a surprise awaited him at Groseillers' fort.
+
+The French habitation--called Fort Bourbon--had been built on the north
+shore of Hayes or Ste. Therese River.  Directly north, overland, was
+another broad river with a gulflike entrance.  This was the Nelson.
+Between the two rivers ran a narrow neck of swampy, bush-grown land.
+The day that Radisson returned to the newly erected fort, there rolled
+across the marshes the ominous echo of cannon-firing.  Who could the
+newcomers be?  A week's sail south at the head of the bay were the
+English establishments of the Hudson's Bay Company.  The season was far
+advanced.  Had English ships come to winter on Nelson River?  Ordering
+Jean Groseillers to go back inland to the Indians, Radisson launched
+down Hayes River in search of the strange ship.  He went to the salt
+water, but saw nothing.  Upon returning, he found that Jean Groseillers
+had come back to the fort with news of more cannonading farther inland.
+Radisson rightly guessed that the ship had sailed up Nelson River,
+firing cannon as she went to notify Indians for trade.  Picking out
+three intrepid men, Radisson crossed the marsh by a creek which the
+Indian canoes used, to go to Nelson River.[7]  Through the brush the
+scout spied a white tent on an island.  All night the Frenchmen lay in
+the woods, watching their rivals and hoping that some workman might
+pass close enough to be seized and questioned.  At noon, next day,
+Radisson's patience was exhausted.  He paddled round the island, and
+showed himself a cannon-shot distant from the fort.  Holding up a pole,
+Radisson waved as if he were an Indian afraid to approach closer in
+order to trade.  The others hallooed a welcome and gabbled out Indian
+words from a guide-book.  Radisson paddled a length closer.  The others
+ran eagerly down to the water side away from their cannon.  In signal
+of friendship, they advanced unarmed.  Radisson must have laughed to
+see how well his ruse worked.
+
+"Who are you?" he demanded in plain English, "and what do you want?"
+The traders called back that they were Englishmen come for beaver.
+Again the crafty Frenchman must have laughed; for he knew very well
+that all English ships except those of the Hudson's Bay Company were
+prohibited by law from coming here to trade.[8]  Though the strange
+ship displayed an English ensign, the flag did not show the magical
+letters "H. B. C."
+
+"Whose commission have you?" pursued Radisson.
+
+"No commission--New Englanders," answered the others.
+
+"Contrabands," thought Radisson to himself.  Then he announced that he
+had taken possession of all that country for France, had built a strong
+fort, and expected more ships.  In a word, he advised the New
+Englanders to save themselves by instant flight; but his canoe had
+glided nearer.  To Radisson's surprise, he discovered that the leader
+of the New England poachers was Ben Gillam of Boston, son of Captain
+Gillam, the trusted servant of the Hudson's Bay Company, who had
+opposed Radisson and Groseillers on Rupert's River.  It looked as if
+the contraband might be a venture of the father as well as the son.[9]
+Radisson and young Gillam recognized each other with a show of
+friendliness, Gillam inviting Radisson to inspect the ship with much
+the same motive that the fabled spider invited the fly.  Radisson took
+tactful precaution for his own liberty by graciously asking that two of
+the New England servants go down to the canoe with the three Frenchmen.
+No sooner had Radisson gone on the New England ship than young Gillam
+ordered cannon fired and English flags run up.  Having made that brave
+show of strength, the young man proposed that the French and the New
+Englanders should divide the traffic between them for the winter.
+Radisson diplomatically suggested that such an important proposal be
+laid before his colleagues.  In leaving, he advised Gillam to keep his
+men from wandering beyond the island, lest they suffer wrong at the
+hands of the French soldiers.  Incidentally, that advice would also
+keep the New Englanders from learning how desperately weak the French
+really were.  Neither leader was in the slightest deceived by the
+other; each played for time to take the other unawares, and each knew
+the game that was being played.
+
+[Illustration: Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from Tea
+Chests at York Factory, each Coin representing so many Beaver Skins.]
+
+Instead of returning by the creek that cut athwart the neck of land
+between the two rivers, Radisson decided to go down Nelson River to the
+bay, round the point, and ascend Hayes River to the French quarters.
+Cogitating how to frighten young Gillam out of the country or else to
+seize him, Radisson glided down the swift current of Nelson River
+toward salt water.  He had not gone nine miles from the New Englanders
+when he was astounded by the spectacle of a ship breasting with
+full-blown sails up the tide of the Nelson directly in front of the
+French canoe.  The French dashed for the hiding of the brushwood on
+shore.  From their concealment they saw that the ship was a Hudson's
+Bay Company vessel, armed with cannon and commission for lawful trade.
+If once the Hudson's Bay Company ship and the New Englanders united,
+the English would be strong enough to overpower the French.
+
+The majority of leaders would have escaped the impending disaster by
+taking ingloriously to their heels.  Radisson, with that adroit
+presence of mind which characterized his entire life, had provided for
+his followers' safety by landing them on the south shore, where the
+French could flee across the marsh to the ships if pursued.  Then his
+only thought was how to keep the rivals apart.  Instantly he had an
+enormous bonfire kindled.  Then he posted his followers in ambush.  The
+ship mistook the fire for an Indian signal, reefed its sails, and
+anchored.  Usually natives paddled out to the traders' ships to barter.
+These Indians kept in hiding.  The ship waited for them to come; and
+Radisson waited for the ship's hands to land.  In the morning a gig
+boat was lowered to row ashore.  In it were Captain Gillam, Radisson's
+personal enemy, John Bridgar,[10] the new governor of the Hudson's Bay
+Company for Nelson River, and six sailors.  All were heavily armed, yet
+Radisson stood alone to receive them, with his three companions posted
+on the outskirts of the woods as if in command of ambushed forces.
+Fortune is said to favor the dauntless, and just as the boat came
+within gunshot of the shore, it ran aground.  A sailor jumped out to
+drag the craft up the bank.  They were all at Radisson's mercy--without
+cover.  He at once levelled his gun with a shout of "Halt!"  At the
+same moment his own men made as if to sally from the woods.  The
+English imagined themselves ambushed, and called out that they were the
+officers of the Hudson's Bay Company.  Radisson declared who he was and
+that he had taken possession of the country for France.  His musket was
+still levelled.  His men were ready to dash forward.  The English put
+their heads together and decided that discretion was the better part of
+valor.  Governor Bridgar meekly requested permission to land and salute
+the commander of the French.  Then followed a pompous melodrama of
+bravado, each side affecting sham strength.  Radisson told the English
+all that he had told the New Englanders, going on board the Company's
+ship to dine, while English hostages remained with his French
+followers.  For reasons which he did not reveal, he strongly advised
+Governor Bridgar not to go farther up Nelson River.  Above all, he
+warned Captain Gillam not to permit the English sailors to wander
+inland.  Having exchanged compliments, Radisson took gracious leave of
+his hosts, and with his three men slipped down the Nelson in their
+canoe.  Past a bend in the river, he ordered the canoe ashore.  The
+French then skirted back through the woods and lay watching the English
+till satisfied that the Hudson's Bay Company ship would go no nearer
+the island where Ben Gillam lay hidden.
+
+Groseillers and his son looked after the trade that winter.  Radisson
+had his hands full keeping the two English crews apart.  Ten days after
+his return, he again left Hayes River to see what his rivals were
+doing.  The Hudson's Bay Company ship had gone aground in the ooze a
+mile from the fort where Governor Bridgar had taken up quarters.  That
+division of forces weakened the English fort.  Introducing his man as
+captain of a French ship, Radisson entered the governor's house.  The
+visitors drained a health to their host and fired off muskets to learn
+whether sentinels were on guard.  No attention was paid to the unwonted
+noise.  "I judged," writes Radisson, "that they were careless, and
+might easily be surprised."  He then went across to the river flats,
+where the tide had left the vessel, and, calmly mounting the ladder,
+took a survey of Gillam's ship.  When the irate old captain rushed up
+to know the meaning of the intrusion Radisson suavely proffered
+provisions, of which they were plainly in need.
+
+The New Englanders had been more industrious.  A stoutly palisaded fort
+had been completed on young Gillam's island, and cannon commanded all
+approach.  Radisson fired a musket to notify the sentry, and took care
+to beach his canoe below the range of the guns.  Young Gillam showed a
+less civil front than before.  His lieutenant ironically congratulated
+Radisson on his "safe" return, and invited him to visit the fort if he
+would enter _alone_.  When Radisson would have introduced his four
+followers, the lieutenant swore "if the four French were forty devils,
+they could not take the New Englanders' fort."  The safety of the
+French habitation now hung by a hair.  Everything depended on keeping
+the two English companies apart, and they were distant only nine miles.
+The scheme must have flashed on Radisson in an intuition; for he laid
+his plans as he listened to the boastings of the New Englanders.  If
+father and son could be brought together through Radisson's favor,
+Captain Gillam would keep the English from coming to the New England
+fort lest his son should be seized for poaching on the trade of the
+Company; and Ben Gillam would keep his men from going near the English
+fort lest Governor Bridgar should learn of the contraband ship from
+Boston.  Incidentally, both sides would be prevented from knowing the
+weakness of the French at Fort Bourbon.  At once Radisson told young
+Gillam of his father's presence.  Ben was eager to see his father and,
+as he thought, secure himself from detection in illegal trade.
+Radisson was to return to the old captain with the promised provisions.
+He offered to take young Gillam, disguised as a bush-ranger.  In
+return, he demanded (1) that the New Englanders should not leave their
+fort; (2) that they should not betray themselves by discharging cannon;
+(3) that they shoot any Hudson's Bay Company people who tried to enter
+the New England fort.  To young Gillam these terms seemed designed for
+his own protection.  What they really accomplished was the complete
+protection of the French from united attack.  Father and son would have
+put themselves in Radisson's power.  A word of betrayal to Bridgar, the
+Hudson's Bay governor, and both the Gillams would be arrested for
+illegal trade.  Ben Gillam's visit to his father was fraught with all
+the danger that Radisson's daring could have desired.  A seaman half
+suspected the identity of the bush-ranger, and Governor Bridgar wanted
+to know how Radisson had returned so soon when the French fort was far
+away.  "I told him, smiling," writes Radisson, "that I could fly when
+there was need to serve my friends."
+
+Young Gillam had begun to suspect the weakness of the French.  When the
+two were safely out of the Hudson's Bay Company fort, he offered to go
+home part of the way with Radisson.  This was to learn where the French
+fort lay.  Radisson declined the kindly service and deliberately set
+out from the New Englanders' island in the wrong direction, coming down
+the Nelson past young Gillam's fort at night.  The delay of the trick
+nearly cost Radisson his life.  Fall rains had set in, and the river
+was running a mill-race.  Great floes of ice from the North were
+tossing on the bay at the mouth of the Nelson River in a maelstrom of
+tide and wind.  In the dark Radisson did not see how swiftly his canoe
+had been carried down-stream.  Before he knew it his boat shot out of
+the river among the tossing ice-floes of the bay.  Surrounded by ice in
+a wild sea, he could not get back to land.  The spray drove over the
+canoe till the Frenchman's clothes were stiff with ice.  For four hours
+they lay jammed in the ice-drift till a sudden upheaval crushed the
+canoe to kindling wood and left the men stranded on the ice.  Running
+from floe to floe, they gained the shore and beat their way for three
+days through a raging hurricane of sleet and snow toward the French
+habitation.  They were on the side of the Hayes opposite the French
+fort.  Four _voyageurs_ crossed for them, and the little company at
+last gained the shelter of a roof.
+
+Radisson now knew that young Gillam intended to spy upon the French; so
+he sent scouts to watch the New Englanders' fort.  The scouts reported
+that the young captain had sent messengers to obtain additional men
+from his father; but the New England soldiers, remembering Radisson's
+orders to shoot any one approaching, had levelled muskets to fire at
+the re�nforcements.  The rebuffed men had gone back to Governor Bridgar
+with word of a fort and ship only nine miles up Nelson River.  Bridgar
+thought this was the French establishment, and old Captain Gillam could
+not undeceive him.  The Hudson's Bay Company governor had sent the two
+men back to spy on what he thought was a French fort.  At once Radisson
+sent out men to capture Bridgar's scouts, who were found half dead with
+cold and hunger.  The captives reported to Radisson that the English
+ship had been totally wrecked in the ice jam.  Bridgar's people were
+starving.  Many traders would have left their rivals to perish.
+Radisson supplied them with food for the winter.  They were no longer
+to be feared; but there was still danger from young Gillam.  He had
+wished to visit the French fort.  Radisson decided to give him an
+opportunity.  Ben Gillam was escorted down to Hayes River.  A month
+passed quietly.  The young captain had learned that the boasted forces
+of the French consisted of less than thirty men.  His insolence knew no
+bounds.  He struck a French servant, called Radisson a pirate, and
+gathering up his belongings prepared to go home.  Radisson quietly
+barred the young man's way.
+
+"You pitiful dog!" said the Frenchman, coolly.  "You poor young fool!
+Why do you suppose you were brought to this fort?  We brought you here
+because it suited us!  We keep you here as long as it suits us!  We
+take you back when it suits us!"
+
+Ben Gillam was dumfounded to find that he had been trapped, when he had
+all the while thought that he was acting the part of a clever spy.  He
+broke out in a storm of abuse.  Radisson remanded the foolish young man
+to a French guard.  At the mess-room table Radisson addressed his
+prisoner:--
+
+"Gillam, to-day I set out to capture your fort."
+
+At the table sat less than thirty men.  Young Gillam gave one scornful
+glance at the French faces and laughed.
+
+"If you had a hundred men instead of twenty," he jeered.
+
+"How many have you, Ben?"
+
+"Nine; and they'll kill you before you reach the palisades."
+
+Radisson was not talking of killing.
+
+"Gillam," he returned imperturbably, "pick out nine of my men, and I
+have your fort within forty-eight hours."
+
+Gillam chose the company, and Radisson took one of the Hudson Bay
+captives as a witness.  The thing was done as easily as a piece of
+farcical comedy.  French hostages had been left among the New
+Englanders as guarantee of Gillam's safety in Radisson's fort.  These
+hostages had been instructed to drop, as if by chance, blocks of wood
+across the doors of the guard-room and powder house and barracks.  Even
+these precautions proved unnecessary.  Two of Radisson's advance guard,
+who were met by the lieutenant of the New England fort, reported that
+"Gillam had remained behind."  The lieutenant led the two Frenchmen
+into the fort.  These two kept the gates open for Radisson, who marched
+in with his band, unopposed.  The keys were delivered and Radisson was
+in possession.  At midnight the watch-dogs raised an alarm, and the
+French sallied out to find that a New Englander had run to the Hudson's
+Bay Company for aid, and Governor Bridgar's men were attacking the
+ships.  All of the assailants fled but four, whom Radisson caught
+ransacking the ship's cabin.  Radisson now had more captives than he
+could guard, so he loaded the Hudson's Bay Company men with provisions
+and sent them back to their own starving fort.
+
+Radisson left the New England fort in charge of his Frenchmen and
+returned to the French quarters.  Strange news was carried to him
+there.  Bridgar had forgotten all benefits, waited until Radisson's
+back was turned, and, with one last desperate cast of the die to
+retrieve all by capturing the New England fort and ship for the fur
+company, had marched against young Gillam's island.  The French threw
+open the gates for the Hudson's Bay governor to enter.  Then they
+turned the key and told Governor Bridgar that he was a prisoner.  Their
+_coup_ was a complete triumph for Radisson.  Both of his rivals were
+prisoners, and the French flag flew undisputed over Port Nelson.
+
+Spring brought the Indians down to the bay with the winter's hunt.  The
+sight of threescore Englishmen captured by twenty Frenchmen roused the
+war spirit of the young braves.  They offered Radisson two hundred
+beaver skins to be allowed to massacre the English.  Radisson thanked
+the savages for their good will, but declined their offer.  Floods had
+damaged the water-rotted timbers of the two old hulls in which the
+explorers voyaged north.  It was agreed to return to Quebec in Ben
+Gillam's boat.  A vessel was constructed on one of the hulls to send
+the English prisoners to the Hudson's Bay Company forts at the south
+end of the bay.[11]  Young Jean Groseillers was left, with seven men,
+to hold the French post till boats came in the following year.  On the
+27th of July the ships weighed anchor for the homeward voyage.  Young
+Gillam was given a free passage by way of Quebec.  Bridgar was to have
+gone with his men to the Hudson's Bay Company forts at the south of the
+bay, but at the last moment a friendly Englishman warned Radisson that
+the governor's design was to wait till the large ship had left, head
+the bark back for Hayes River, capture the fort, and put the Frenchmen
+to the sword.  To prevent this Bridgar, too, was carried to Quebec.
+Twenty miles out the ship was caught in ice-floes that held her for a
+month, and Bridgar again conspired to cut the throats of the Frenchmen.
+Henceforth young Gillam and Bridgar were out on parole during the day
+and kept under lock at night.
+
+The same jealousy as of old awaited Radisson at Quebec.  The Company of
+the North was furious that La Chesnaye had sent ships to Hudson Bay,
+which the shareholders considered to be their territory by license.[12]
+Farmers of the Revenue beset the ship to seize the cargo, because the
+explorers had gone North without a permit.  La Chesnaye saved some of
+the furs by transshipping them for France before the vessel reached
+Quebec.  Then followed an interminable lawsuit, that exhausted the
+profits of the voyage.  La Barre had succeeded Frontenac as governor.
+The best friends of La Barre would scarcely deny that his sole ambition
+as governor was to amass a fortune from the fur trade of Canada.
+Inspired by the jealous Company of the North, he refused to grant
+Radisson prize money for the capture of the contraband ship, restored
+the vessel to Gillam, and gave him clearance to sail for Boston.[13]
+For this La Barre was sharply reprimanded from France; but the
+reprimand did not mend the broken fortunes of the two explorers, who
+had given their lives for the extension of the French domain.[14]  M.
+Colbert summoned Radisson and Groseillers to return to France and give
+an account of all they had done; but when they arrived in Paris, on
+January 15, 1684, they learned that the great statesman had died.  Lord
+Preston, the English envoy, had lodged such complaints against them for
+the defeat of the Englishmen in Hudson Bay, that France hesitated to
+extend public recognition of their services.
+
+
+[1] Within ten years so many different regulations were promulgated on
+the fur trade that it is almost impossible to keep track of them.  In
+1673 orders came from Paris forbidding French settlers of New France
+from wandering in the woods for longer than twenty-four hours.  In 1672
+M. Frontenac forbade the selling of merchandise to _coureurs du bois_,
+or the purchase of furs from them.  In 1675 a decree of the Council of
+State awarded to M. Jean Oudiette one-fourth of all beaver, with the
+exclusive right of buying and selling in Canada.  In 1676 Frontenac
+withdrew from the _Cie Indes Occidentales_ all the rights it had over
+Canada and other places.  An ordinance of October 1, 1682, forbade all
+trade except under license.  An ordinance in 1684 ordered all fur
+traders trading in Hudson Bay to pay one-fourth to Farmers of the
+Revenue.
+
+[2] It is hard to tell who this Godefroy was.  Of all the famous
+Godefroys of Three Rivers (according to Abb� Tanguay) there was only
+one, Jean Batiste, born 1658, who might have gone with Radisson; but I
+hardly think so.  The Godefroys descended from the French nobility and
+themselves bore titles from the king, but in spite of this, were the
+best canoemen of New France, as ready--according to Mr. Sulte--to
+_faire la cuisine_ as to command a fort.  Radisson's Godefroy evidently
+went in the capacity of a servant, for his name is not mentioned in the
+official list of promoters.  On the other hand, parish records do not
+give the date of Jean Batiste Godefroy's death; so that he may have
+gone as a servant and died in the North.
+
+[3] State Papers, 1683, state that Dame Sorel, La Chesnaye, Chaujon,
+Gitton, Foret, and others advanced money for the goods.
+
+[4] In 1898, when up the coast of Labrador, I was told by the
+superintendent of a northern whaling station--a man who has received
+royal decorations for his scientific research of ocean phenomena--that
+he has frequently seen icebergs off Labrador that were nine miles long.
+
+[5] Jean was born in 1654 and was, therefore, twenty-eight.
+
+[6] I have written both addresses as the Indians would chant them.  To
+be sure, they will not scan according to the elephantine grace of the
+pedant's iambics; but then, neither will the Indian songs scan, though
+I know of nothing more subtly rhythmical.  Rhythm is so much a part of
+the Indian that it is in his walk, in the intonation of his words, in
+the gesture of his hands.  I think most Westerners will bear me out in
+saying that it is the exquisitely musical intonation of words that
+betrays Indian blood to the third and fourth generation.
+
+[7] See Robson's map.
+
+[8] State Papers: "The Governor of New England is ordered to seize all
+vessels trading in Hudson Bay contrary to charter--"
+
+[9] _Radisson's Journal_, p. 277.
+
+[10] Robson gives the commission to this governor.
+
+[11] Later in Hudson Bay history, when another commander captured the
+forts, the prisoners were sold into slavery.  Radisson's treatment of
+his rivals hardly substantiates all the accusations of rascality
+trumped up against him.  Just how many prisoners he took in this
+_coup_, no two records agree.
+
+[12] Archives, September 24, 1683: Ordinance of M. de Meulles regarding
+the claims of persons interested in the expedition to Hudson Bay,
+organized by M. de la Chesnaye, Gitton, Bruneau, Mme. Sorel. . . .  In
+order to avoid difficulties with the Company of the North, they had
+placed a vessel at Isle Perc�e to receive the furs brought back . . .
+and convey them to Holland and Spain. . . .  Joachims de Chalons, agent
+of the Company of the North, sent a _bateau_ to Perc�e to defeat the
+project.  De la Chesnaye, summoned to appear before the intendant,
+maintained that the company had no right to this trade, . . . that the
+enterprise involved so many risks that he could not consent to divide
+the profits, if he had any.  The partners having been heard, M. de
+Meulles orders that the boats from Hudson Bay be anchored at Quebec.
+
+[13] Archives, October 25, 1683: M. de la Barre grants Benjamin Gillam
+of Boston clearance for the ship _Le Gar�on_, now in port at Quebec,
+although he had no license from his Britannic Majesty permitting him to
+enter Hudson Bay.
+
+[14] Such foundationless accusations have been written against Radisson
+by historians who ought to have known better, about these furs, that I
+quote the final orders of the government on the subject: November 5,
+1683, M. de la Barre forbids Chalons, agent of La Ferme du Canada,
+confiscating the furs brought from Hudson Bay; November 8 M. de la
+Chesnaye is to be paid for the furs seized.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+1684-1710
+
+THE LAST VOYAGE OF RADISSON TO HUDSON BAY
+
+France refuses to restore the Confiscated Furs and Radisson tries to
+redeem his Fortune--Re�ngaged by England, he captures back Fort Nelson,
+but comes to Want in his Old Age--his Character
+
+
+Radisson was now near his fiftieth year.  He had spent his entire life
+exploring the wilds.  He had saved New France from bankruptcy with
+cargoes of furs that in four years amounted to half a million of modern
+money.  In ten years he had brought half a million dollars worth of
+furs to the English company.[1]  Yet he was a poor man, threatened with
+the sponging-house by clamorous creditors and in the power of
+avaricious statesmen, who used him as a tool for their own schemes.  La
+Chesnaye had saved his furs; but the half of the cargo that was the
+share of Radisson and Groseillers had been seized at Quebec.[2] On
+arriving in France, Groseillers presented a memorial of their wrong to
+the court.[3]  Probably because England and France were allied by
+treaty at that time, the petition for redress was ignored.  Groseillers
+was now an old man.  He left the struggle to Radisson and retired to
+spend his days in quietness.[4]  Radisson did not cease to press his
+claim for the return of confiscated furs.  He had a wife and four
+children to support; but, in spite of all his services to England and
+France, he did not own a shilling's worth of property in the whole
+world.  From January to May he waited for the tardy justice of the
+French court.  When his suit became too urgent, he was told that he had
+offended the Most Christian King by attacking the fur posts under the
+protection of a friendly monarch, King Charles.  The hollowness of that
+excuse became apparent when the French government sanctioned the
+fitting out of two vessels for Radisson to go to Hudson Bay in the
+spring.  Lord Preston, the English ambassador, was also playing a
+double game.  He never ceased to reproach the French for the
+destruction of the fur posts on Hudson Bay.  At the same time he
+besieged Radisson with offers to return to the service of the Hudson's
+Bay Company.
+
+Radisson was deadly tired of the farce.  From first to last France had
+treated him with the blackest injustice.  If he had wished to be rich,
+he could long ago have accumulated wealth by casting in his lot with
+the dishonest rulers of Quebec.  In England a strong clique, headed by
+Bridgar, Gillam, and Bering opposed him; but King Charles and the Duke
+of York, Prince Rupert, when he was alive, Sir William Young, Sir James
+Hayes, and Sir John Kirke were in his favor.  His heart yearned for his
+wife and children.  Just then letters came from England urging him to
+return to the Hudson's Bay Company.  Lord Preston plied the explorer
+with fair promises.  Under threat of punishment for molesting the
+English of Hudson Bay, the French government tried to force him into a
+contract to sail on a second voyage to the North on the same terms as
+in 1682-1683--not to share the profits.  England and France were both
+playing double.  Radisson smiled a grim smile and took his resolution.
+Daily he conferred with the French Marine on details of the voyage.  He
+permitted the date of sailing to be set for April 24.  Sailors were
+enlisted, stores put on board, everything was in readiness.  At the
+last moment, Radisson asked leave of absence to say good-by to his
+family.  The request was granted.  Without losing a moment, he sailed
+for England, where he arrived on the 10th of May and was at once taken
+in hand by Sir William Young and Sir James Hayes.  He was honored as
+his explorations entitled him to be.  King Charles and the Duke of York
+received him.  Both royal brothers gave him gifts in token of
+appreciation.  He took the oath of fealty and cast in his lot with the
+English for good.  It was characteristic of the enthusiast that he was,
+when Radisson did not sign a strictly business contract with the
+Hudson's Bay Company.  "I accepted their commission with the greatest
+pleasure in the world," he writes; ". . . without any precautions on my
+part for my own interests . . . since they had confidence in me, I
+wished to be generous towards them . . . in the hope they would render
+me all the justice due from gentlemen of honor and probity."
+
+But to the troubles of the future Radisson always paid small heed.
+Glad to be off once more to the adventurous freedom of the wilds, he
+set sail from England on May 17, 1684, in the _Happy Return_,
+accompanied by two other vessels.  No incident marked the voyage till
+the ships had passed through the straits and were driven apart by the
+ice-drift of the bay.  About sixty miles out from Port Nelson, the
+_Happy Return_ was held back by ice.  Fearing trouble between young
+Jean Groseillers' men and the English of the other ships, Radisson
+embarked in a shallop with seven men in order to arrive at Hayes River
+before the other boats came.  Rowing with might and main for
+forty-eight hours, they came to the site of the French fort.
+
+The fort had been removed.  Jean Groseillers had his own troubles
+during Radisson's absence.  A few days after Radisson's departure in
+July, 1683, cannon announced the arrival of the annual English ships on
+Nelson River.  Jean at once sent out scouts, who found a tribe of
+Indians on the way home from trading with the ships that had fired the
+cannon.  The scouts brought the Indians back to the French fort.  Young
+Groseillers admitted the savages only one at a time; but the cunning
+braves pretended to run back for things they had forgotten in the
+French house.  Suspecting nothing, Jean had permitted his own men to
+leave the fort.  On different pretexts, a dozen warriors had surrounded
+the young trader.  Suddenly the mask was thrown off.  Springing up,
+treacherous as a tiger cat, the chief of the band struck at Groseillers
+with a dagger.  Jean parried the blow, grabbed the redskin by his
+collar of bears' claws strung on thongs, threw the assassin to the
+ground almost strangling him, and with one foot on the villain's throat
+and the sword point at his chest, demanded of the Indians what they
+meant.  The savages would have fled, but French soldiers who had heard
+the noise dashed to Groseillers' aid.  The Indians threw down their
+weapons and confessed all: the Englishmen of the ship had promised the
+band a barrel of powder to massacre the French.  Jean took his foot
+from the Indian's throat and kicked him out of the fort.  The English
+outnumbered the French; so Jean removed his fort farther from the bay,
+among the Indians, where the English could not follow.  To keep the
+warriors about him, he offered to house and feed them for the winter.
+This protected him from the attacks of the English.  In the spring
+Indians came to the French with pelts.  Jean was short of firearms; so
+he bribed the Indians to trade their peltries to the English for guns,
+and to retrade the guns to him for other goods.  It was a stroke worthy
+of Radisson himself, and saved the little French fort.  The English
+must have suspected the young trader's straits, for they again paid
+warriors to attack the French; but Jean had forestalled assault by
+forming an alliance with the Assiniboines, who came down Hayes River
+from Lake Winnipeg four hundred strong, and encamped a body-guard
+around the fort.  Affairs were at this stage when Radisson arrived with
+news that he had transferred his services to the English.
+
+Young Groseillers was amazed.[5]  Letters to his mother show that he
+surrendered his charge with a very ill grace.  "Do not forget,"
+Radisson urged him, "the injuries that France has inflicted on your
+father."  Young Groseillers' mother, Marguerite Hayet, was in want at
+Three Rivers.[6]  It was memory of her that now turned the scales with
+the young man.  He would turn over the furs to Radisson for the English
+Company, if Radisson would take care of the far-away mother at Three
+Rivers.  The bargain was made, and the two embraced.  The surrender of
+the French furs to the English Company has been represented as
+Radisson's crowning treachery.  Under that odium the great discoverer's
+name has rested for nearly three centuries; yet the accusation of theft
+is without a grain of truth.  Radisson and Groseillers were to obtain
+half the proceeds of the voyage in 1682-1683.  Neither the explorers
+nor Jean Groseillers, who had privately invested 500 pounds in the
+venture, ever received one sou.  The furs at Port Nelson--or Fort
+Bourbon--belonged to the Frenchmen, to do what they pleased with them.
+The act of the enthusiast is often tainted with folly.  That Radisson
+turned over twenty thousand beaver pelts to the English, without the
+slightest assurance that he would be given adequate return, was surely
+folly; but it was not theft.
+
+The transfer of all possessions to the English was promptly made.
+Radisson then arranged a peace treaty between the Indians and the
+English.  That peace treaty has endured between the Indians and the
+Hudson's Bay Company to this day.  A new fort was built, the furs
+stored in the hold of the vessels, and the crews mustered for the
+return voyage.  Radisson had been given a solemn promise by the
+Hudson's Bay Company that Jean Groseillers and his comrades should be
+well treated and re�ngaged for the English at 100 pounds a year.  Now
+he learned that the English intended to ship all the French out of
+Hudson Bay and to keep them out.  The enthusiast had played his game
+with more zeal than discretion.  The English had what they wanted--furs
+and fort.  In return, Radisson had what had misled him like a
+will-o'-the-wisp all his life--vague promises.  In vain Radisson
+protested that he had given his promise to the French before they
+surrendered the fort.  The English distrusted foreigners.  The
+Frenchmen had been mustered on the ships to receive last instructions.
+They were told that they were to be taken to England.  No chance was
+given them to escape.  Some of the French had gone inland with the
+Indians.  Of Jean's colony, these alone remained.  When Radisson
+realized the conspiracy, he advised his fellow-countrymen to make no
+resistance; for he feared that some of the English bitter against him
+might seize on the pretext of a scuffle to murder the French.  His
+advice proved wise.  He had strong friends at the English court, and
+atonement was made for the breach of faith to the French.
+
+The ships set sail on the 4th of September and arrived in England on
+the 23d of October.  Without waiting for the coach, Radisson hired a
+horse and spurred to London in order to give his version first of the
+quarrel on the bay.  The Hudson's Bay Company was delighted with the
+success of Radisson.  He was taken before the directors, given a
+present of a hundred guineas, and thanked for his services.  He was
+once more presented to the King and the Duke of York.  The company
+redeemed its promise to Radisson by employing the Frenchmen of the
+surrendered fort and offering to engage young Groseillers at 100 pounds
+a year.[7]
+
+[Illustration: Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower
+Fort Garry, Red River.  (Courtesy of C. C. Chipman, Commissioner H. B.
+Company.)]
+
+For five years the English kept faith with Radisson, and he made annual
+voyages to the bay; but war broke out with France.  New France entered
+on a brilliant campaign against the English of Hudson Bay.  The
+company's profits fell.  Radisson, the Frenchman, was distrusted.
+France had set a price on his head, and one Martini�re went to Port
+Nelson to seize him, but was unable to cope with the English.  At no
+time did Radisson's salary with the company exceed 100 pounds; and now,
+when war stopped dividends on the small amount of stock which had been
+given to him, he fell into poverty and debt.  In 1692 Sir William Young
+petitioned the company in his favor; but a man with a price on his head
+for treason could plainly not return to France.[8]  The French were in
+possession of the bay.  Radisson could do no harm to the English.
+Therefore the company ignored him till he sued them and received
+payment in full for arrears of salary and dividends on stock which he
+was not permitted to sell; but 50 pounds a year would not support a man
+who paid half that amount for rent, and had a wife, four children, and
+servants to support.  In 1700 Radisson applied for the position of
+warehouse keeper for the company at London.  Even this was denied.
+
+The dauntless pathfinder was growing old; and the old cannot fight and
+lose and begin again as Radisson had done all his life.  State Papers
+of Paris contain records of a Radisson with Tonty at Detroit![9]  Was
+this his nephew, Fran�ois Radisson's son, who took the name of the
+explorer, or Radisson's own son, or the game old warrior himself, come
+out to die on the frontier as he had lived?
+
+History is silent.  Until the year 1710 Radisson drew his allowance of
+50 pounds a year from the English Company, then the payments stopped.
+Did the dauntless life stop too?  Oblivion hides all record of his
+death, as it obscured the brilliant achievements of his life.
+
+
+There is no need to point out Radisson's faults.  They are written on
+his life without extenuation or excuse, so that all may read.  There is
+less need to eulogize his virtues.  They declare themselves in every
+act of his life.  This, only, should be remembered.  Like all
+enthusiasts, Radisson could not have been a hero, if he had not been a
+bit of a fool.  If he had not had his faults, if he had not been as
+impulsive, as daring, as reckless, as inconstant, as improvident of the
+morrow, as a savage or a child, he would not have accomplished the
+exploration of half a continent.  Men who weigh consequences are not of
+the stuff to win empires.  Had Radisson haggled as to the means, he
+would have missed or muddled the end.  He went ahead; and when the way
+did not open, he went round, or crawled over, or carved his way through.
+
+There was an old saying among retired hunters of Three Rivers that "one
+learned more in the woods than was ever found in l' petee
+cat-ee-cheesm."  Radisson's training was of the woods, rather than the
+cur�'s catechism; yet who that has been trained to the strictest code
+may boast of as dauntless faults and noble virtues?  He was not
+faithful to any country, but he was faithful to his wife and children;
+and he was "faithful to his highest hope,"--that of becoming a
+discoverer,--which is more than common mortals are to their meanest
+aspirations.  When statesmen played him a double game, he paid them
+back in their own coin with compound interest.  Perhaps that is why
+they hated him so heartily and blackened his memory.  But amid all the
+mad license of savage life, Radisson remained untainted.  Other
+explorers and statesmen, too, have left a trail of blood to perpetuate
+their memory; Radisson never once spilled human blood needlessly, and
+was beloved by the savages.
+
+Memorial tablets commemorate other discoverers.  Radisson needs none.
+The Great Northwest is his monument for all time.
+
+
+[1] Radisson's petition to the Hudson's Bay Company gives these amounts.
+
+[2] See State Papers quoted in Chapter VI.  I need scarcely add that
+Radisson did not steal a march on his patrons by secretly shipping furs
+to Europe.  This is only another of the innumerable slanders against
+Radisson which State Papers disprove.
+
+[3] It seems impossible that historians with the slightest regard for
+truth should have branded this part of _Radisson's Relation_ as a
+fabrication, too.  Yet such is the case, and of writers whose books are
+supposed to be reputable.  Since parts of Radisson's life appeared in
+the magazines, among many letters I received one from a well-known
+historian which to put it mildly was furious at the acceptance of
+_Radisson's Journal_ as authentic.  In reply, I asked that historian
+how many documents contemporaneous with Radisson's life he had
+consulted before he branded so great an explorer as Radisson as a liar.
+Needless to say, that question was not answered.  In corroboration of
+this part of Radisson's life, I have lying before me: (1) Chouart's
+letters--see Appendix.  (2) A letter of Frontenac recording Radisson's
+first trip by boat for De la Chesnaye and the complications it would be
+likely to cause.  (3) A complete official account sent from Quebec to
+France of Radisson's doings in the bay, which tallies in every respect
+with _Radisson's Journal_.  (4) Report of M. de Meulles to the Minister
+on the whole affair with the English and New Englanders.  (5) An
+official report on the release of Gillam's boat at Quebec.  (6) The
+memorial presented by Groseillers to the French minister.  (7) An
+official statement of the first discovery of the bay overland.  (8) A
+complete statement (official) of the complications created by
+Radisson's wife being English.  (9) A statement through a third
+party--presumably an official--by Radisson himself of these
+complications dated 1683.  (10) A letter from the king to the governor
+at Quebec retailing the English complaints of Radisson at Nelson River.
+
+In the face of this, what is to be said of the historian who calls
+Radisson's adventures "a fabrication"?  Such misrepresentation betrays
+about equal amounts of impudence and ignorance.
+
+[4] From Charlevoix to modern writers mention is made of the death of
+these two explorers.  Different names are given as the places where
+they died.  This is all pure supposition.  Therefore I do not quote.
+No records exist to prove where Radisson and Groseillers died.
+
+[5] See Appendix.
+
+[6] State Papers record payment of money to her because she was in want.
+
+[7] Dr. George Bryce, who is really the only scholar who has tried to
+unravel the mystery of Radisson's last days, supplies new facts about
+his dealings with the Company to 1710.
+
+[8] Marquis de Denonville ordered the arrest of Radisson wherever he
+might be found.
+
+[9] Appendix; see State Papers.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA: BEING AN
+  ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE ROCKY
+  MOUNTAINS, THE MISSOURI UPLANDS, AND THE
+  VALLEY OF THE SASKATCHEWAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+1730-1750
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA[1]
+
+M. de la V�rendrye continues the Exploration of the Great Northwest by
+establishing a Chain of Fur Posts across the Continent--Privations of
+the Explorers and the Massacre of Twenty Followers--His Sons visit the
+Mandans and discover the Rockies--The Valley of the Saskatchewan is
+next explored, but Jealousy thwarts the Explorer, and he dies in Poverty
+
+
+I
+
+1731-1736
+
+A curious paradox is that the men who have done the most for North
+America did not intend to do so.  They set out on the far quest of a
+crack-brained idealist's dream.  They pulled up at a foreshortened
+purpose; but the unaccomplished aim did more for humanity than the
+idealist's dream.
+
+Columbus set out to find Asia.  He discovered America.  Jacques Cartier
+sought a mythical passage to the Orient.  He found a northern empire.
+La Salle thought to reach China.  He succeeded only in exploring the
+valley of the Mississippi, but the new continent so explored has done
+more for humanity than Asia from time immemorial.  Of all crack-brained
+dreams that led to far-reaching results, none was wilder than the
+search for the Western Sea.  Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had
+followed the trail that Radisson had blazed and explored the valley of
+the Mississippi; but like a will-o'-the-wisp beckoning ever westward
+was that undiscovered myth, the Western Sea, thought to lie like a
+narrow strait between America and Japan.
+
+The search began in earnest one sweltering afternoon on June 8, 1731,
+at the little stockaded fort on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where
+Montreal stands to-day.  Fifty grizzled adventurers--wood runners,
+voyageurs, Indian interpreters--bareheaded, except for the colored
+handkerchief binding back the lank hair, dressed in fringed buckskin,
+and chattering with the exuberant nonchalance of boys out of school,
+had finished gumming the splits of their ninety-foot birch canoes, and
+now stood in line awaiting the coming of their captain, Sieur Pierre
+Gaultier de Varennes de la V�rendrye.  The French soldier with his
+three sons, aged respectively eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen, now
+essayed to discover the fabled Western Sea, whose narrow waters were
+supposed to be between the valley of the "Great Forked River" and the
+Empire of China.
+
+[Illustration: Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight.]
+
+Certainly, if it were worth while for Peter the Great of Russia to send
+Vitus Bering coasting the bleak headlands of ice-blocked, misty shores
+to find the Western Sea, it would--as one of the French governors
+reported--"be nobler than open war" for the little colony of New France
+to discover this "sea of the setting sun."  The quest was invested with
+all the rainbow tints of "_la gloire_"; but the rainbow hopes were
+founded on the practical basis of profits.  Leading merchants of
+Montreal had advanced goods for trade with the Indians on the way to
+the Western Sea.  Their expectations of profits were probably the same
+as the man's who buys a mining share for ten cents and looks for
+dividends of several thousand per cent.  And the fur trade at that time
+was capable of yielding such profits.  Traders had gone West with less
+than $2000 worth of goods in modern money, and returned three years
+later with a sheer profit of a quarter of a million.  Hope of such
+returns added zest to De la V�rendrye's venture for the discovery of
+the Western Sea.
+
+Goods done up in packets of a hundred pounds lay at the feet of the
+_voyageurs_ awaiting De la V�rendrye's command.  A dozen soldiers in
+the plumed hats, slashed buskins, the brightly colored doublets of the
+period, joined the motley company.  Priests came out to bless the
+departing _voyageurs_.  Chapel bells rang out their God-speed.  To the
+booming of cannon, and at a word from De la V�rendrye, the gates
+opened.  Falling in line with measured tread, the soldiers marched out
+from Mount Royal.  Behind, in the ambling gait of the moccasined
+woodsman, came the _voyageurs_ and _coureurs_ and interpreters,
+pack-straps across their foreheads, packets on the bent backs, the long
+birch canoes hoisted to the shoulders of four men, two abreast at each
+end, heads hidden in the inverted keel.
+
+The path led between the white fret of Lachine Rapids and the dense
+forests that shrouded the base of Mount Royal.  Checkerboard squares of
+farm patches had been cleared in the woods.  La Salle's old
+thatch-roofed seigniory lay not far back from the water.  St. Anne's
+was the launching place for fleets of canoes that were to ascend the
+Ottawa.  Here, a last look was taken of splits and seams in the birch
+keels.  With invocations of St. Anne in one breath, and invocations of
+a personage not mentioned in the cur�'s "petee cat-ee-cheesm" in the
+next breath, and imprecations that their "souls might be smashed on the
+end of a picket fence,"--the _voyageur's_ common oath even to this
+day,--the boatmen stored goods fore, aft, and athwart till each long
+canoe sank to the gunwale as it was gently pushed out on the water.  A
+last sign of the cross, and the lithe figures leap light as a mountain
+cat to their place in the canoes.  There are four benches of paddlers,
+two abreast, with bowman and steersman, to each canoe.  One can guess
+that the explorer and his sons and his nephew, Sieur de la Jemmeraie,
+who was to be second in command, all unhatted as they heard the long
+last farewell of the bells.  Every eye is fastened on the chief
+bowman's steel-shod pole, held high--there is silence but for the
+bells--the bowman's pole is lowered--as with one stroke out sweep the
+paddles in a poetry of motion.  The chimes die away over the water, the
+chapel spire gleams--it, too, is gone.  Some one strikes up a plaintive
+ditty,--the _voyageur's_ song of the lost lady and the faded roses, or
+the dying farewell of Cadieux, the hunter, to his comrades,--and the
+adventurers are launched for the Western Sea.
+
+[Illustration: Fight at the Foot-hills of the Rockies between Crows and
+Snakes.]
+
+
+II
+
+1731-1736
+
+Every mile westward was consecrated by heroism.  There was the place
+where Cadieux, the white hunter, went ashore single-handed to hold the
+Iroquois at bay, while his comrades escaped by running the rapids; but
+Cadieux was assailed by a subtler foe than the Iroquois, _la folie des
+bois_,--the folly of the woods,--that sends the hunter wandering in
+endless circles till he dies from hunger; and when his companions
+returned, Cadieux lay in eternal sleep with a death chant scribbled on
+bark across his breast.  There were the Rapids of the Long Sault where
+Dollard and seventeen Frenchmen fought seven hundred Iroquois till
+every white man fell.  Not one of all De la V�rendrye's fifty followers
+but knew that perils as great awaited him.
+
+Streaked foam told the voyageurs where they were approaching rapids.
+Alert as a hawk, the bowman stroked for the shore; and his stroke was
+answered by all paddles.  If the water were high enough to carry the
+canoes above rocks, and the rapids were not too violent, several of the
+boatmen leaped out to knees in water, and "tracked" the canoes up
+stream; but this was unusual with loaded craft.  The bowman steadied
+the beached keel.  Each man landed with pack on his back, lighted his
+pipe, and trotted away over portages so dank and slippery that only a
+moccasined foot could gain hold.  On long portages, camp-fires were
+kindled and the kettles slung on the crotched sticks for the evening
+meal.  At night, the voyageurs slept under the overturned canoes, or
+lay on the sand with bare faces to the sky.  Morning mist had not risen
+till all the boats were once more breasting the flood of the Ottawa.
+For a month the canoe prows met the current when a portage lifted the
+fleet out of the Ottawa into a shallow stream flowing toward Lake
+Nipissing, and from Lake Nipissing to Lake Huron.  The change was a
+welcome relief.  The canoes now rode with the current; and when a wind
+sprang up astern, blanket sails were hoisted that let the boatmen lie
+back, paddles athwart.  Going with the stream, the _voyageurs_ would
+"run"--"_sauter les rapides_"--the safest of the cataracts.  Bowman,
+not steersman, was the pilot of such "runs."  A faint, far swish as of
+night wind, little forward leaps and swirls of the current, the blur of
+trees  on  either bank, were signs to the bowman.  He rose in his
+place.  A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream--the
+rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below--the
+bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his
+horse to the leap; a sudden splash--the thing has happened--the canoe
+has run the rapids or shot the falls.
+
+[Illustration:  "Each man landed with pack on his back, and trotted
+away over portages."]
+
+Pause was made at Lake Huron for favorable weather; and a rear wind
+would carry the canoes at a bouncing pace clear across to
+Michilimackinac, at the mouth of Lake Michigan.  This was the chief fur
+post of the lakes at that time.  All the boats bound east or west,
+Sioux and Cree and Iroquois and Fox, traders' and priests' and
+outlaws'--stopped at Michilimackinac.  Vice and brandy and religion
+were the characteristics of the fort.
+
+[Illustration: A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands.]
+
+This was familiar ground to De la V�rendrye.  It was at the lonely fur
+post of Nepigon, north of Michilimackinac, in the midst of a wilderness
+forest, that he had eaten his heart out with baffled ambition from 1728
+to 1730, when he descended to Montreal to lay before M. de Beauharnois,
+the governor, plans for the discovery of the Western Sea.  Born at
+Three Rivers in 1686, where the passion for discovery and Radisson's
+fame were in the very air and traders from the wilderness of the Upper
+Country wintered, young Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la V�rendrye, at
+the ambitious age of fourteen, determined that he would become a
+discoverer.[2]  At eighteen he was fighting in New England, at nineteen
+in Newfoundland, at twenty-three in Europe at the battle of Malplaquet,
+where he was carried off the field with nine wounds.  Eager for more
+distinguished service, he returned to Canada in his twenty-seventh
+year, only to find himself relegated to an obscure trading post in far
+Northern wilds.  Then the boyhood ambitions reawakened.  All France and
+Canada, too, were ringing with projects for the discovery of the
+Western Sea.  Russia was acting.  France knew it.  The great priest
+Charlevoix had been sent to Canada to investigate plans for the
+venture, and had recommended an advance westward through the country of
+the Sioux; but the Sioux[3] swarmed round the little fort at Lake Pepin
+on the Mississippi like angry wasps.  That way, exploration was plainly
+barred.  Nothing came of the attempt except a brisk fur trade and a
+brisker warfare on the part of the Sioux.  At the lonely post of
+Nepigon, vague Indian tales came to De la V�rendrye of "a great river
+flowing west" and "a vast, flat country devoid of timber" with "large
+herds of cattle."  Ochagach, an old Indian, drew maps on birch bark
+showing rivers that emptied into the Western Sea.  De la V�rendrye's
+smouldering ambitions kindled.  He hurried to Michilimackinac.  There
+the traders and Indians told the same story.  Glory seemed suddenly
+within De la V�rendrye's grasp.  Carried away with the passion for
+discovery that ruled his age, he took passage in the canoes bound for
+Quebec.  The Marquis Charles de Beauharnois had become governor.  His
+brother Claude had taken part in the exploration of the Mississippi.
+The governor favored the project of the Western Sea.  Perhaps Russia's
+activity gave edge to the governor's zest; but he promised De la
+V�rendrye the court's patronage and prestige.  This was not money.
+France would not advance the enthusiast one sou, but granted him a
+monopoly of the fur trade in the countries which he might discover.
+The winter of 1731-1732 was spent by De la V�rendrye as the guest of
+the governor at Ch�teau St. Louis, arranging with merchants to furnish
+goods for trade; and on May 19 the agreement was signed.  By a lucky
+coincidence, the same winter that M. de la V�rendrye had come down to
+Quebec, there had arrived from the Mississippi fort, his nephew,
+Christopher Dufrost, Sieur de la Jemmeraie, who had commanded the Sioux
+post and been prisoner among the Indians.  So M. de la V�rendrye chose
+Jemmeraie for lieutenant.
+
+And now the explorer was back at Michilimackinac, on the way to the
+accomplishment of the daring ambition of his life.  The trip from
+Montreal had fatigued the _voyageurs_.  Brandy flowed at the lake post
+freely as at a modern mining camp.  The explorer kept military
+discipline over his men.  They received no pay which could be
+squandered away on liquor.  Discontent grew rife.  Taking Father
+Messaiger, the Jesuit, as chaplain, M. de la V�rendrye ordered his
+grumbling _voyageurs_ to their canoes, and, passing through the Straits
+of the Sault, headed his fleet once more for the Western Sea.  Other
+explorers had preceded him on this part of the route.  The Jesuits had
+coasted the north shore of Lake Superior.  So had Radisson.  In 1688 De
+Noyon of Three Rivers had gone as far west as the Lake of the Woods
+towards what is now Minnesota and Manitoba; and in 1717 De Lanoue had
+built a fur post at Kaministiquia, near what is now Fort William on
+Lake Superior.  The shore was always perilous to the boatman of frail
+craft.  The harbors were fathoms deep, and the waves thrashed by a
+cross wind often proved as dangerous as the high sea.  It took M. de la
+V�rendrye's canoemen a month to coast from the Straits of Mackinaw to
+Kaministiquia, which they reached on the 26th of August, seventy-eight
+days after they had left Montreal.  The same distance is now traversed
+in two days.
+
+Prospects were not encouraging.  The crews were sulky.  Kaministiquia
+was the outermost post in the West.  Within a month, the early Northern
+winter would set in.  One hunter can scramble for his winter's food
+where fifty will certainly starve; and the Indians could not be
+expected back from the chase with supplies of furs and food till
+spring.  The canoemen had received no pay.  Free as woodland denizens,
+they chafed under military command.  Boats were always setting out at
+this season for the homeland hamlets of the St. Lawrence; and perhaps
+other hunters told De la V�rendrye's men that this Western Sea was a
+will-o'-the-wisp that would lead for leagues and leagues over strange
+lands, through hostile tribes, to a lonely death in the wilderness.
+When the explorer ordered his men once more in line to launch for the
+Western Sea, there was outright mutiny.  Soldiers and boatmen refused
+to go on.  The Jesuit Messaiger threatened and expostulated with the
+men.  Jemmeraie, who had been among the Sioux, interceded with the
+_voyageurs_.  A compromise was effected.  Half the boatmen would go
+ahead with Jemmeraie if M. de la V�rendrye would remain with the other
+half at Lake Superior as a rear guard for retreat and the supply of
+provisions.  So the explorer suffered his first check in the advance to
+the Western Sea.
+
+
+III
+
+1732-1736
+
+Equipping four canoes, Lieutenant de la Jemmeraie and young Jean
+Ba'tiste de la V�rendrye set out with thirty men from Kaministiquia,
+_portaged_ through dense forests over moss and dank rock past the high
+cataract of the falls, and launched westward to prepare a fort for the
+reception of their leader in spring.  Before winter had closed
+navigation, Fort St. Pierre--named in honor of the explorer--had been
+erected on the left bank or Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, and the two
+young men not only succeeded in holding their mutinous followers, but
+drove a thriving trade in furs with the Crees.  Perhaps the furs were
+obtained at too great cost, for ammunition and firearms were the price
+paid, but the same mistake has been made at a later day for a lesser
+object than the discovery of the Western Sea.  The spring of 1732 saw
+the young men back at Lake Superior, going post-haste to
+Michilimackinac to exchange furs for the goods from Montreal.
+
+On the 8th of June, exactly a year from the day that he had left
+Montreal, M. de la V�rendrye pushed forward with all his people for
+Fort St. Pierre.  Five weeks later he was welcomed inside the
+stockades.  Uniformed soldiers were a wonder to the awe-struck Crees,
+who hung round the gateway with hands over their hushed lips.  Gifts of
+ammunition won the loyalty of the chiefs.  Not to be lacking in
+generosity, the Indians collected fifty of their gaudiest canoes and
+offered to escort the explorer west to the Lake of the Woods.  De la
+V�rendrye could not miss such an offer.  Though his _voyageurs_ were
+fatigued, he set out at once.  He had reached Fort St. Pierre on July
+14.  In August his entire fleet glided over the Lake of the Woods.  The
+threescore canoes manned by the Cree boatmen threaded the shadowy
+defiles and labyrinthine channels of the Lake of the Woods--or Lake of
+the Isles--coasting island after island along the south or Minnesota
+shore westward to the opening of the river at the northwest angle.
+This was the border of the Sioux territory.  Before the boatmen opened
+the channel of an unknown river.  Around them were sheltered harbors,
+good hunting, and good fishing.  The Crees favored this region for
+winter camping ground because they could hide their families from the
+Sioux on the sheltered islands of the wooded lake.  Night frosts had
+painted the forests red.  The flacker of wild-fowl overhead, the skim
+of ice forming on the lake, the poignant sting of the north wind--all
+fore-warned winter's approach.  Jean de la V�rendrye had not come up
+with the supplies from Michilimackinac.  The explorer did not tempt
+mutiny by going farther.  He ordered a halt and began building a fort
+that was to be the centre of operations between Montreal and the
+unfound Western Sea.  The fort was named St. Charles in honor of
+Beauharnois.  It was defended by four rows of thick palisades fifteen
+feet high.  In the middle of the enclosure stood the living quarters,
+log cabins with thatched roofs.
+
+[Illustration: A Group of Cree Indians.]
+
+By October the Indians had scattered to their hunting-grounds like
+leaves to the wind.  The ice thickened.  By November the islands were
+ice-locked and snow had drifted waist-high through the forests.  The
+_voyageurs_ could still fish through ice holes for food; but where was
+young Jean who was to bring up provisions from Michilimackinac?  The
+commander did not voice his fears; and his men were too deep in the
+wilds for desertion.  One afternoon, a shout sounded from the silent
+woods, and out from the white-edged evergreens stepped a figure on
+snowshoes--Jean de la V�rendrye, leading his boatmen, with the
+provisions packed on their backs, from a point fifty miles away where
+the ice had caught the canoes.  If the supplies had not come, the
+explorer could neither have advanced nor retreated in spring.  It was a
+risk that De la V�rendrye did not intend to have repeated.  Suspecting
+that his merchant partners were dissatisfied, he sent Jemmeraie down to
+Montreal in 1733 to report and urge the necessity for prompt forwarding
+of all supplies.  With Jemmeraie went the Jesuit Messaiger; but their
+combined explanations failed to satisfy the merchants of Montreal.  De
+la V�rendrye had now been away three years.  True, he had constructed
+two fur posts and sent East two cargoes of furs.  His partners were
+looking for enormous wealth.  Disappointed and caring nothing for the
+Western Sea; perhaps, too, secretly accusing De la V�rendrye of making
+profits privately, as many a gentleman of fortune did,--the merchants
+decided to advance provisions only in proportion to earnings.  What
+would become of the fifty men in the Northern wilderness the partners
+neither asked nor cared.
+
+Young Jean had meanwhile pushed on and built Fort Maurepas on Lake
+Winnipeg; but his father dared not leave Fort St. Charles without
+supplies.  De la V�rendrye's position was now desperate.  He was
+hopelessly in debt to his men for wages.  That did not help discipline.
+His partners were not only withholding supplies, but charging up a high
+rate of interest on the first equipment.  To turn back meant ruin.  To
+go forward he was powerless.  Leaving Jemmeraie in command, and
+permitting his eager son to go ahead with a few picked men to Fort
+Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, De la V�rendrye took a small canoe and
+descended with all swiftness to Quebec.  The winter of 1634-1635 was
+spent with the governor; and the partners were convinced that they must
+either go on with the venture or lose all.  They consented to continue
+supplying goods, but also charging all outlay against the explorer.
+
+Father Aulneau went back with De la V�rendrye as chaplain.  The trip
+was made at terrible speed, in the hottest season, through stifling
+forest fires.  Behind, at slower pace, came the provisions.  De la
+V�rendrye reached the Lake of the Woods in September.  Fearing the
+delay of the goods for trade, and dreading the danger of famine with so
+many men in one place, De la V�rendrye despatched Jemmeraie to winter
+with part of the forces at Lake Winnipeg, where Jean and Pierre, the
+second son, had built Fort Maurepas.  The worst fears were realized.
+Ice had blocked the Northern rivers by the time the supplies had come
+to Lake Superior.  Fishing failed.  The hunt was poor.  During the
+winter of 1736 food became scantier at the little forts of St. Pierre,
+St. Charles, and Maurepas.  Rations were reduced from three times to
+once and twice a day.  By spring De la V�rendrye was put to all the
+extremities of famine-stricken traders, his men subsisting on
+parchment, moccasin leather, roots, and their hunting dogs.
+
+He was compelled to wait at St. Charles for the delayed supplies.
+While he waited came blow upon blow: Jean and Pierre arrived from Fort
+Maurepas with news that Jemmeraie had died three weeks before on his
+way down to aid De la V�rendrye.  Wrapped in a hunter's robe, his body
+was buried in the sand-bank of a little Northern stream, La Fourche des
+Roseaux.  Over the lonely grave the two brothers had erected a cross.
+Father and sons took stock of supplies.  They had not enough powder to
+last another month, and already the Indians were coming in with furs
+and food to be traded for ammunition.  If the Crees had known the
+weakness of the white men, short work might have been made of Fort St.
+Charles.  It never entered the minds of De la V�rendrye and his sons to
+give up.  They decided to rush three canoes of twenty _voyageurs_ to
+Michilimackinac for food and powder.  Father Aulneau, the young priest,
+accompanied the boatmen to attend a religious retreat at
+Michilimackinac.  It had been a hard year for the youthful missionary.
+The ship that brought him from France had been plague-stricken.  The
+trip to Fort St. Charles had been arduous and swift, through stifling
+heat; and the year passed in the North was one of famine.
+
+Accompanied by the priest and led by Jean de la V�rendrye, now in his
+twenty-third year, the _voyageurs_ embarked hurriedly on the 8th of
+June, 1736, five years to a day from the time that they left
+Montreal--and a fateful day it was--in the search for the Western Sea.
+The Crees had always been friendly; and when the boatmen landed on a
+sheltered island twenty miles from Fort St. Charles to camp for the
+night, no sentry was stationed.  The lake lay calm as glass in the hot
+June night, the camp-fire casting long lines across the water that
+could be seen for miles.  An early start was to be made in the morning
+and a furious pace to be kept all the way to Lake Superior, and the
+_voyageurs_ were presently sound asleep on the sand.  The keenest ears
+could scarcely have distinguished the soft lapping of muffled paddles;
+and no one heard the moccasined tread of ambushed Indians
+reconnoitring.  Seventeen Sioux stepped from their canoes, stole from
+cover to cover, and looked out on the unsuspecting sleepers.  Then the
+Indians as noiselessly slipped back to their canoes to carry word of
+the discovery to a band of marauders.
+
+[Illustration: "The soldiers marched out from Mount Royal."]
+
+Something had occurred at Fort St. Charles without M. de la V�rendrye's
+knowledge.  Hilarious with their new possessions of firearms, and
+perhaps, also, mad with the brandy of which Father Aulneau had
+complained, a few mischievous Crees had fired from the fort on
+wandering Sioux of the prairie.
+
+"Who--fire--on--us?" demanded the outraged Sioux.
+
+"The French," laughed the Crees.
+
+The Sioux at once went back to a band of one hundred and thirty
+warriors.  "Tigers of the plains" the Sioux were called, and now the
+tigers' blood was up.  They set out to slay the first white man seen.
+By chance, he was one Bourassa, coasting by himself.  Taking him
+captive, they had tied him to burn him, when a slave squaw rushed out,
+crying: "What would you do?  This Frenchman is a friend of the Sioux!
+He saved my life!  If you desire to be avenged, go farther on!  You
+will find a camp of Frenchmen, among whom is the son of the white
+chief!"
+
+The _voyageur_ was at once unbound, and scouts scattered to find the
+white men.  Night had passed before the scouts had carried news of Jean
+de la V�rendrye's men to the marauding warriors.  The ghostly gray of
+dawn saw the _voyageurs_ paddling swiftly through the morning mist from
+island to island of the Lake of the Woods.  Cleaving the mist behind,
+following solely by the double foam wreaths rippling from the canoe
+prows, came the silent boats of the Sioux.  When sunrise lifted the
+fog, the pursuers paused like stealthy cats.  At sunrise Jean de la
+V�rendrye landed his crews for breakfast.  Camp-fires told the Indians
+where to follow.
+
+
+A few days later bands of Sautaux came to the camping ground of the
+French.  The heads of the white men lay on a beaver skin.  All had been
+scalped.  The missionary, Aulneau, was on his knees, as if in morning
+prayers.  An arrow projected from his head.  His left hand was on the
+earth, fallen forward, his right hand uplifted, invoking Divine aid.
+Young V�rendrye lay face down, his back hacked to pieces, a spear sunk
+in his waist, the headless body mockingly decorated with porcupine
+quills.  So died one of the bravest of the young nobility in New France.
+
+The Sautaux erected a cairn of stones over the bodies of the dead.  All
+that was known of the massacre was vague Indian gossip.  The Sioux
+reported that they had not intended to murder the priest, but a
+crazy-brained fanatic had shot the fatal arrow and broken from
+restraint, weapon in hand.  Rain-storms had washed out all marks of the
+fray.
+
+In September the bodies of the victims were carried to Fort St.
+Charles, and interred in the chapel.  Eight hundred Crees besought M.
+de la V�rendrye to let them avenge the murder; but the veteran of
+Malplaquet exhorted them not to war.  Meanwhile, Fort St. Charles
+awaited the coming of supplies from Lake Superior.
+
+
+IV
+
+1736-1740
+
+A week passed, and on the 17th of June the canoe loads of ammunition
+and supplies for which the murdered _voyageurs_ had been sent arrived
+at Fort St. Charles.  In June the Indian hunters came in with the
+winter's hunt; and on the 20th thirty Sautaux hurried to Fort St.
+Charles, to report that they had found the mangled bodies of the
+massacred Frenchmen on an island seven leagues from the fort.  Again La
+V�rendrye had to choose whether to abandon his cherished dreams, or
+follow them at the risk of ruin and death.  As before, when his men had
+mutinied, he determined to advance.
+
+Jean, the eldest son, was dead.  Pierre and Fran�ois were with their
+father.  Louis, the youngest, now seventeen years of age, had come up
+with the supplies.  Pierre at once went to Lake Winnipeg, to prepare
+Fort Maurepas for the reception of all the forces.  Winter set in.
+Snow lay twelve feet deep in the forests now known as the Minnesota
+Borderlands.  On February 8, 1737, in the face of a biting north wind,
+with the thermometer at forty degrees below zero, M. de la V�rendrye
+left Fort St. Charles, Fran�ois carrying the French flag, with ten
+soldiers, wearing snow-shoes, in line behind, and two or three hundred
+Crees swathed in furs bringing up a ragged rear.  The bright uniforms
+of the soldiers were patches of red among the snowy everglades.
+Bivouac was made on beds of pine boughs,--feet to the camp-fire, the
+night frost snapping like a whiplash, the stars flashing with a steely
+clearness known only in northern climes.  The march was at a swift
+pace, for three weeks by canoe is short enough time to traverse the
+Minnesota and Manitoba Borderlands northwest to Lake Winnipeg; and in
+seventeen days M. de la V�rendrye was at Fort Maurepas.
+
+Fort Maurepas (in the region of the modern Alexander) lay on a tongue
+of sand extending into the lake a few miles beyond the entrance of Red
+River.  Tamarack and poplar fringe the shore; and in windy weather the
+lake is lashed into a roughness that resembles the flux of ocean tides.
+I remember once going on a steamer towards the site of Maurepas.  The
+ship drew lightest of draft.  While we were anchored the breeze fell,
+and the ship was stranded as if by ebb tide for twenty-four hours.  The
+action of the wind explained the Indian tales of an ocean tide, which
+had misled La V�rendrye into expecting to find the Western Sea at this
+point.  He found a magnificent body of fresh water, but not the ocean.
+The fort was the usual pioneer fur post--a barracks of unbarked logs,
+chinked up with frozen clay and moss, roofed with branches and snow,
+occupying the centre of a courtyard, palisaded by slabs of pine logs.
+M. de la V�rendrye was now in the true realm of the explorer--in
+territory where no other white man had trod.  With a shout his motley
+forces emerged from the snowy tamaracks, and with a shout from Pierre
+de la V�rendrye and his tawny followers the explorer was welcomed
+through the gateway of little Fort Maurepas.
+
+[Illustration: Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca
+River.]
+
+Pierre de la V�rendrye had heard of a region to the south much
+frequented by the Assiniboine Indians, who had conducted Radisson to
+the Sea of the North fifty years before--the Forks where the
+Assiniboine River joins the Red, and the city of Winnipeg stands
+to-day.  It was reported that game was plentiful here.  Two hundred
+tepees of Assiniboines were awaiting the explorer.  His forces were
+worn with their marching, but in a few weeks the glaze of ice above the
+fathomless drifts of snow would be too rotten for travel, and not until
+June would the riverways be clear for canoes.  But such a scant supply
+of goods had his partners sent up that poor De la V�rendrye had nothing
+to trade with the waiting Assiniboines.  Sending his sons forward to
+reconnoitre the Forks of the Assiniboine,--the modern Winnipeg,--he set
+out for Montreal as soon as navigation opened, taking with him fourteen
+great canoes of precious furs.
+
+The fourteen canoe loads proved his salvation.  As long as there were
+furs and prospects of furs, his partners would back the enterprise of
+finding the Western Sea.  The winter of 1738 was spent as the guest of
+the governor at Ch�teau St. Louis.  The partners were satisfied, and
+plucked up hope of their venture.  They would advance provisions in
+proportion to earnings.  By September he was back at Fort Maurepas on
+Lake Winnipeg, pushing for the undiscovered bourne of the Western Sea.
+Leaving orders for trade with the chief clerk at Maurepas, De la
+V�rendrye picked out his most intrepid men; and in September of 1738,
+for the first time in history, white men glided up the ochre-colored,
+muddy current of the Red for the Forks of the Assiniboine.  Ten Cree
+wigwams and two war chiefs awaited De la V�rendrye on the low flats of
+what are now known as South Winnipeg.  Not the fabled Western Sea, but
+an illimitable ocean of rolling prairie--the long russet grass rising
+and falling to the wind like waves to the run of invisible
+feet--stretched out before the eager eyes of the explorer.  Northward
+lay the autumn-tinged brushwood of Red River.  South, shimmering in the
+purple mists of Indian summer, was Red River Valley.  Westward the sun
+hung like a red shield, close to the horizon, over vast reaches of
+prairie billowing to the sky-line in the tide of a boundless ocean.
+Such was the discovery of the Canadian Northwest.
+
+Doubtless the weary gaze of the tired _voyageurs_ turned longingly
+westward.  Where was the Western Sea?  Did it lie just beyond the
+horizon where skyline and prairie met, or did the trail of their quest
+run on--on--on--endlessly?  The Assiniboine flows into the Red, the Red
+into Lake Winnipeg, the Lake into Hudson Bay.  Plainly, Assiniboine
+Valley was not the way to the Western Sea.  But what lay just beyond
+this Assiniboine Valley?  An old Cree chief warned the boatmen that the
+Assiniboine River was very low and would wreck the canoes; but he also
+told vague yarns of "great waters beyond the mountains of the setting
+sun," where white men dwelt, and the waves came in a tide, and the
+waters were salt.  The Western Sea where the Spaniards dwelt had long
+been known.  It was a Western Sea to the north, that would connect
+Louisiana and Canada, that De la V�rendrye sought.  The Indian fables,
+without doubt, referred to a sea beyond the Assiniboine River, and
+thither would De la V�rendrye go at any cost.  Some sort of barracks or
+shelter was knocked up on the south side of the Assiniboine opposite
+the flats.  It was subsequently known as Fort Rouge, after the color of
+the adjacent river, and was the foundation of Winnipeg.  Leaving men to
+trade at Fort Rouge, De la V�rendrye set out on September 26, 1738, for
+the height of land that must lie beyond the sources of the Assiniboine.
+De la V�rendrye was now like a man hounded by his own Frankenstein.  A
+thousand leagues--every one marked by disaster and failure and sinking
+hopes--lay behind him.  A thousand leagues of wilderness lay before
+him.  He had only a handful of men.  The Assiniboine Indians were of
+dubious friendliness.  The white men were scarce of food.  In a few
+weeks they would be exposed to the terrible rigors of Northern winter.
+Yet they set their faces toward the west, types of the pioneers who
+have carved empire out of wilderness.
+
+[Illustration: The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains.]
+
+The Assiniboine was winding and low, with many sand bars.  On the
+wooded banks deer and buffalo grazed in such countless multitudes that
+the boatmen took them for great herds of cattle.  Flocks of wild geese
+darkened the sky overhead.  As the boats wound up the shallows of the
+river, ducks rose in myriad flocks.  Prairie wolves skulked away from
+the river bank, and the sand-hill cranes were so unused to human
+presence that they scarcely rose as the voyageurs poled past.  While
+the boatmen poled, the soldiers marched in military order across
+country, so avoiding the bends of the river.  Daily, Crees and
+Assiniboines of the plains joined the white men.  A week after leaving
+the Forks or Fort Rouge, De la V�rendrye came to the Portage of the
+Prairie, leading north to Lake Manitoba and from the lake to Hudson
+Bay.  Clearly, northward was not the way to the Western Sea; but the
+Assiniboines told of a people to the southwest--the Mandans--who knew a
+people who lived on the Western Sea.  As soon as his baggage came up,
+De la V�rendrye ordered the construction of a fort--called De la
+Reine--on the banks of the Assiniboine.  This was to be the forwarding
+post for the Western Sea.  To the Mandans living on the Missouri, who
+knew a people living on salt water, De la V�rendrye now directed his
+course.
+
+[Illustration: Hungry Hall, 1870; near the site of the V�rendrye Fort
+in Rainy River Region.]
+
+On the morning of October 18 drums beat to arms.  Additional men had
+come up from the other forts.  Fifty-two soldiers and _voyageurs_ now
+stood in line.  Arms were inspected.  To each man were given powder,
+balls, axe, and kettle.  Pierre and Fran�ois de la V�rendrye hoisted
+the French flag.  For the first time a bugle call sounded over the
+prairie.  At the word, out stepped the little band of white men,
+marking time for the Western Sea.  The course lay west-southwest, up
+the Souris River, through wooded ravines now stripped of foliage, past
+alkali sloughs ice-edged by frost, over rolling cliffs russet and bare,
+where gopher and badger and owl and roving buffalo were the only signs
+of life.  On the 21st of October two hundred Assiniboine warriors
+joined the marching white men.  In the sheltered ravines buffalo grazed
+by the hundreds of thousands, and the march was delayed by frequent
+buffalo hunts to gather pemmican--pounded marrow and fat of the
+buffalo--which was much esteemed by the Mandans.  Within a month so
+many Assiniboines had joined the French that the company numbered more
+than six hundred warriors, who were ample protection against the Sioux;
+and the Sioux were the deadly terror of all tribes of the plains.  But
+M.  de la V�rendrye was expected to present ammunition to his
+Assiniboine friends.
+
+Four outrunners went speeding to the Missouri to notify the Mandans of
+the advancing warriors.  The _coureurs_ carried presents of pemmican.
+To prevent surprise, the Assiniboines marched under the sheltered
+slopes of the hills and observed military order.  In front rode the
+warriors, dressed in garnished buckskin and armed with spears and
+arrows.  Behind, on foot, came the old and the lame.  To the rear was
+another guard of warriors.  Lagging in ragged lines far back came a
+ragamuffin brigade, the women, children, and dogs--squaws astride
+cayuses lean as barrel hoops, children in moss bags on their mothers'
+backs, and horses and dogs alike harnessed with the _travaille_--two
+sticks tied into a triangle, with the shafts fastened to a cinch on
+horse or dog.  The joined end of the shafts dragged on the ground, and
+between them hung the baggage, surmounted by papoose, or pet owl, or
+the half-tamed pup of a prairie-wolf, or even a wild-eyed young squaw
+with hair flying to the wind.  At night camp was made in a circle
+formed of the hobbled horses.  Outside, the dogs scoured in pursuit of
+coyotes.  The women and children took refuge in the centre, and the
+warriors slept near their picketed horses.  By the middle of November
+the motley cavalcade had crossed the height of land between the
+Assiniboine River and the Missouri, and was heading for the Mandan
+villages.  Mandan _coureurs_ came out to welcome the visitors,
+pompously presenting De la V�rendrye with corn in the ear and tobacco.
+At this stage, the explorer discovered that his bag of presents for his
+hosts had been stolen by the Assiniboines; but he presented the Mandans
+with what ammunition he could spare, and gave them plenty of pemmican
+which his hunters had cured.  The two tribes drove a brisk trade in
+furs, which the northern Indians offered, and painted plumes, which the
+Mandans displayed to the envy of Assiniboine warriors.
+
+On the 3d of December, De la V�rendrye's sons stepped before the ragged
+host of six hundred savages with the French flag hoisted.  The explorer
+himself was lifted to the shoulders of the Mandan _coureurs_.  A gun
+was fired and the strange procession set out for the Mandan villages.
+In this fashion white men first took possession of the Upper Missouri.
+Some miles from the lodges a band of old chiefs met De la V�rendrye and
+gravely handed him a grand calumet of pipestone ornamented with eagle
+feathers.  This typified peace.  De la V�rendrye ordered his fifty
+French followers to draw up in line.  The sons placed the French flag
+four paces to the fore.  The Assiniboine warriors took possession in
+stately Indian silence to the right and left of the whites.  At a
+signal three thundering volleys of musketry were fired.  The Mandans
+fell back, prostrated with fear and wonder.  The command "forward" was
+given, and the Mandan village was entered in state at four in the
+afternoon of December 3, 1738.
+
+The village was in much the same condition as a hundred years later
+when visited by Prince Maximilian and by the artist Catlin.  It
+consisted of circular huts, with thatched roofs, on which perched the
+gaping women and children.  Around the village of huts ran a moat or
+ditch, which was guarded in time of war with the Sioux.  Flags flew
+from the centre poles of each hut; but the flags were the scalps of
+enemies slain.  In the centre of the village was a larger hut.  This
+was the "medicine lodge," or council hall, of the chiefs, used only for
+ceremonies of religion and war and treaties of peace.  Thither De la
+V�rendrye was conducted.  Here the Mandan chiefs sat on buffalo robes
+in a circle round the fire, smoking the calumet, which was handed to
+the white man.  The explorer then told the Indians of his search for
+the Western Sea.  Of a Western Sea they could tell him nothing
+definite.  They knew a people far west who grew corn and tobacco and
+who lived on the shores of water that was bitter for drinking.  The
+people were white.  They dressed in armor and lived in houses of stone.
+Their country was full of mountains.  More of the Western Sea, De la
+V�rendrye could not learn.
+
+Meanwhile, six hundred Assiniboine visitors were a tax on the
+hospitality of the Mandans, who at once spread a rumor of a Sioux raid.
+This gave speed to the Assiniboines' departure.  Among the Assiniboines
+who ran off in precipitate fright was De la V�rendrye's interpreter.
+It was useless to wait longer.  The French were short of provisions,
+and the Missouri Indians could not be expected to support fifty white
+men.  Though it was the bitter cold of midwinter, De la V�rendrye
+departed for Fort de la Reine.  Two Frenchmen were left to learn the
+Missouri dialects.  A French flag in a leaden box with the arms of
+France inscribed was presented to the Mandan chief; and De la V�rendrye
+marched from the village on the 8th of December.  Scarcely had he left,
+when he fell terribly ill; but for the pathfinder of the wilderness
+there is neither halt nor retreat.  M. de la V�rendrye's ragged army
+tramped wearily on, half blinded by snow glare and buffeted by prairie
+blizzards, huddling in snowdrifts from the wind at night and uncertain
+of their compass over the white wastes by day.  There is nothing so
+deadly silent and utterly destitute of life as the prairie in
+midwinter.  Moose and buffalo had sought the shelter of wooded ravines.
+Here a fox track ran over the snow.  There a coyote skulked from cover,
+to lope away the next instant for brushwood or hollow, and
+snow-buntings or whiskey-jacks might have followed the marchers for
+pickings of waste; but east, west, north, and south was nothing but the
+wide, white wastes of drifted snow.  On Christmas Eve of 1738 low
+curling smoke above the prairie told the wanderers that they were
+nearing the Indian camps of the Assiniboines; and by nightfall of
+February 10, 1739, they were under the shelter of Fort de la Reine.  "I
+have never been so wretched from illness and fatigue in all my life as
+on that journey," reported De la V�rendrye.  As usual, provisions were
+scarce at the fort.  Fifty people had to be fed.  Buffalo and deer meat
+saved the French from starvation till spring.
+
+[Illustration: A Monarch of the Plains.]
+
+All that De la V�rendrye had accomplished on this trip was to learn
+that salt water existed west-southwest.  Anxious to know more of the
+Northwest, he sent his sons to the banks of a great northern river.
+This was the Saskatchewan.  In their search of the Northwest, they
+constructed two more trading posts, Fort Dauphin near Lake Manitoba,
+and Bourbon on the Saskatchewan.  Winter quarters were built at the
+forks of the river, which afterwards became the site of Fort Poskoyac.
+This spring not a canoe load of food came up from Montreal.  Papers had
+been served for the seizure of all De la V�rendrye's forts, goods,
+property, and chattels to meet the claims of his creditors.  Desperate,
+but not deterred from his quest, De la V�rendrye set out to contest the
+lawsuits in Montreal.
+
+
+V
+
+1740-1750
+
+Which way to turn now for the Western Sea that eluded their quest like
+a will-o'-the-wisp was the question confronting Pierre, Fran�ois, and
+Louis de la V�rendrye during the explorer's absence in Montreal.  They
+had followed the great Saskatchewan westward to its forks.  No river
+was found in this region flowing in the direction of the Western Sea.
+They had been in the country of the Missouri; but neither did any river
+there flow to a Western Sea.  Yet the Mandans told of salt water far to
+the west.  Thither they would turn the baffling search.
+
+The two men left among the Mandans to learn the language had returned
+to the Assiniboine River with more news of tribes from "the setting
+sun" who dwelt on salt water.  Pierre de la V�rendrye went down to the
+Missouri with the two interpreters; but the Mandans refused to supply
+guides that year, and the young Frenchman came back to winter on the
+Assiniboine.  Here he made every preparation for another attempt to
+find the Western Sea by way of the Missouri.  On April 29, 1742, the
+two brothers, Pierre and Fran�ois, left the Assiniboine with the two
+interpreters.  Their course led along the trail that for two hundred
+years was to be a famous highway between the Missouri and Hudson Bay.
+Heading southwest, they followed the Souris River to the watershed of
+the Missouri, and in three weeks were once more the guests of the smoky
+Mandan lodges.  Round the inside walls of each circular hut ran berth
+beds of buffalo skin with trophies of the chase,--hide-shields and
+weapons of war, fastened to the posts that separated berth from berth.
+A common fire, with a family meat pot hanging above, occupied the
+centre of the lodge.  In one of these lodges the two brothers and their
+men were quartered.  The summer passed feasting with the Mandans and
+smoking the calumet of peace; but all was in vain.  The Missouri
+Indians were arrant cowards in the matter of war.  The terror of their
+existence was the Sioux.  The Mandans would not venture through Sioux
+territory to accompany the brothers in the search for the Western Sea.
+At last two guides were obtained, who promised to conduct the French to
+a neighboring tribe that might know of the Western Sea.
+
+[Illustration: Fur Traders' Boats towed down the Saskatchewan in the
+Summer of 1900.]
+
+The party set out on horseback, travelling swiftly southwest and along
+the valley of the Little Missouri toward the Black Hills.  Here their
+course turned sharply west toward the Powder River country, past the
+southern bounds of the Yellowstone.  For three weeks they saw no sign
+of human existence.  Deer and antelope bounded over the parched alkali
+uplands.  Prairie dogs perched on top of their earth mounds, to watch
+the lonely riders pass; and all night the far howl of grayish forms on
+the offing of the starlit prairie told of prowling coyotes.  On the
+11th of August the brothers camped on the Powder Hills.  Mounting to
+the crest of a cliff, they scanned far and wide for signs of the
+Indians whom the Mandans knew.  The valleys were desolate.  Kindling a
+signal-fire to attract any tribes that might be roaming, they built a
+hut and waited.  A month passed.  There was no answering signal.  One
+of the Mandan guides took himself off in fright.  On the fifth week a
+thin line of smoke rose against the distant sky.  The remaining Mandans
+went to reconnoitre and found a camp of Beaux Hommes, or Crows, who
+received the French well.  Obtaining fresh guides from the Crows and
+dismissing the Mandans, the brothers again headed westward.  The Crows
+guided them to the Horse Indians, who in turn took the French to their
+next western neighbors, the Bows.  The Bows were preparing to war on
+the Snakes, a mountain tribe to the west.  Tepees dotted the valley.
+Women were pounding the buffalo meat into pemmican for the raiders.
+The young braves spent the night with war-song and war-dance, to work
+themselves into a frenzy of bravado.  The Bows were to march west; so
+the French joined the warriors, gradually turning northwest toward what
+is now Helena.
+
+It was winter.  The hills were powdered with snow that obliterated all
+traces of the fleeing Snakes.  The way became more mountainous and
+dangerous.  Iced sloughs gave place to swift torrents and cataracts.
+On New Year's day, 1743, there rose through the gray haze to the fore
+the ragged sky-line of the Bighorn Mountains.  Women and children were
+now left in a sheltered valley, the warriors advancing unimpeded.
+Fran�ois de la V�rendrye remained at the camp to guard the baggage.
+Pierre went on with the raiders.  In two weeks they were at the foot of
+the main range of the northern Rockies.  Against the sky the snowy
+heights rose--an impassable barrier between the plains and the Western
+Sea.  What lay beyond--the Beyond that had been luring them on and on,
+from river to river and land to land, for more than ten years?  Surely
+on the other side of those lofty summits one might look down on the
+long-sought Western Sea.  Never suspecting that another thousand miles
+of wilderness and mountain fastness lay between him and his quest,
+young De la V�rendrye wanted to cross the Great Divide.  Destiny
+decreed otherwise.  The raid of the Bows against the Snakes ended in a
+fiasco.  No Snakes were to be found at their usual winter hunt.  Had
+they decamped to massacre the Bow women and children left in the valley
+to the rear?  The Bows fled back to their wives in a panic; so De la
+V�rendrye could not climb the mountains that barred the way to the sea.
+The retreat was made in the teeth of a howling mountain blizzard, and
+the warriors reached the rendezvous more dead than alive.  No Snake
+Indians were seen at all.  The Bows marched homeward along the valley
+of the Upper Missouri through the country of the Sioux, with whom they
+were allied.  On the banks of the river the brothers buried a leaden
+plate with the royal arms of France imprinted.  At the end of July,
+1743, they were once more back on the Assiniboine River.  For thirteen
+years they had followed a hopeless quest.  Instead of a Western Sea,
+they had found a sea of prairie, a sea of mountains, and two great
+rivers, the Saskatchewan and the Missouri.
+
+
+VI
+
+1743-1750
+
+But the explorer, who had done so much to extend French domain in the
+West, was a ruined man.  To the accusations of his creditors were added
+the jealous calumnies of fur traders eager to exploit the new country.
+The eldest son, with tireless energy, had gone up the Saskatchewan to
+Fort Poskoyac when he was recalled to take a position in the army at
+Montreal.  In 1746 De la V�rendrye himself was summoned to Quebec and
+his command given to M. de Noyelles.  The game being played by jealous
+rivals was plain.  De la V�rendrye was to be kept out of the West while
+tools of the Quebec traders spied out the fur trade of the Assiniboine
+and the Missouri.  Immediately on receiving freedom from military duty,
+young Chevalier de la V�rendrye set out for Manitoba.  On the way he
+met his father's successor, M. de Noyelles, coming home crestfallen.
+The supplanter had failed to control the Indians.  In one year half the
+forts of the chain leading to the Western Sea had been destroyed.
+These Chevalier de la V�rendrye restored as he passed westward.
+
+Governor Beauharnois had always refused to believe the charges of
+private peculation against M. de la V�rendrye.  Governor de la
+Galissonni�re was equally favorable to the explorer; and De la
+V�rendrye was decorated with the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, and
+given permission to continue his explorations.  The winter of 1749 was
+passed preparing supplies for the posts of the West; but a life of
+hardship and disappointment had undermined the constitution of the
+dauntless pathfinder.  On the 6th of December, while busy with plans
+for his hazardous and thankless quest, he died suddenly at Montreal.
+
+Rival fur traders scrambled for the spoils of the Manitoba and Missouri
+territory like dogs for a bone.  De la Jonqui�re had become governor.
+Allied with him was the infamous Bigot, the intendant, and those two
+saw in the Western fur trade an opportunity to enrich themselves.  The
+rights of De la V�rendrye's sons to succeed their father were entirely
+disregarded.  Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was appointed commander of the
+Western Sea.  The very goods forwarded by De la V�rendrye were
+confiscated.
+
+[Illustration: "Tepees dotted the valley."]
+
+But Saint-Pierre had enough trouble from his appointment.  His
+lieutenant, M. de Niverville, almost lost his life among hostiles on
+the way down the Saskatchewan after building Fort Lajonqui�re at the
+foothills of the Rockies, where Calgary now stands.  Saint-Pierre had
+headquarters in Manitoba on the Assiniboine, and one afternoon in
+midwinter, when his men were out hunting, he saw his fort suddenly fill
+with armed Assiniboines bent on massacre.  They jostled him aside,
+broke into the armory, and helped themselves to weapons.  Saint-Pierre
+had only one recourse.  Seizing a firebrand, he tore the cover off a
+keg of powder and threatened to blow the Indians to perdition.  The
+marauders dashed from the fort, and Saint-Pierre shot the bolts of gate
+and sally-port.  When the white hunters returned, they quickly gathered
+their possessions together and abandoned Fort de la Reine.  Four days
+later the fort lay in ashes.  So ended the dream of enthusiasts to find
+a way overland to the Western Sea.
+
+
+[1] The authorities for La V�rendrye's life are, of course, his own
+reports as found in the State Papers of the Canadian Archives, Pierre
+Margry's compilation of these reports, and the Rev. Father Jones'
+collection of the _Aulneau Letters_.
+
+[2] The _Pays d'en Haut_ or "Up-Country" was the vague name given by
+the fur traders to the region between the Missouri and the North Pole.
+
+[3] Throughout this volume the word "Sioux" is used as applying to the
+entire confederacy, and not to the Minnesota Sioux only.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+1769-1782
+
+SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE LEADS
+  SAMUEL HEARNE TO THE ARCTIC CIRCLE AND
+  ATHABASCA REGION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+1769-1782
+
+SAMUEL HEARNE
+
+The Adventures of Hearne in his Search for the Coppermine River and the
+Northwest Passage--Hilarious Life of Wassail led by Governor
+Norton--The Massacre of the Eskimo by Hearne's Indians North of the
+Arctic Circle--Discovery of the Athabasca Country--Hearne becomes
+Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but is captured by the
+French--Frightful Death of Norton and Suicide of Matonabbee
+
+
+For a hundred years after receiving its charter to exploit the furs of
+the North, the Hudson's Bay Company slumbered on the edge of a frozen
+sea.
+
+Its fur posts were scattered round the desolate shores of the Northern
+bay like beads on a string; but the languid Company never attempted to
+penetrate the unknown lands beyond the coast.  It was unnecessary.  The
+Indians came to the Company.  The company did not need to go to the
+Indians.  Just as surely as spring cleared the rivers of ice and set
+the unlocked torrents rushing to the sea, there floated down-stream
+Indian dugout and birch canoe, loaded with wealth of peltries for the
+fur posts of the English Company.  So the English sat snugly secure
+inside their stockades, lords of the wilderness, and drove a thriving
+trade with folded hands.  For a penny knife, they bought a beaver skin;
+and the skin sold in Europe for two or three shillings.  The trade of
+the old Company was not brisk; but it paid.
+
+[Illustration: An Eskimo Belle.  Note the apron of ermine and sable].
+
+It was the prod of keen French traders that stirred the slumbering
+giant.  In his search for the Western Sea, De la V�rendrye had pushed
+west by way of the Great Lakes to the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains
+and the Saskatchewan.  Henceforth, not so many furs came down-stream to
+the English Company on the bay.  De la V�rendrye had been followed by
+hosts of free-lances--_coureurs_ and _voyageurs_--who spread through
+the wilderness from the Missouri to the Athabasca, intercepting the
+fleets of furs that formerly went to Hudson Bay.  The English Company
+rubbed its eyes; and rivals at home began to ask what had been done in
+return for the charter.  France had never ceased seeking the mythical
+Western Sea that was supposed to lie just beyond the Mississippi; and
+when French buccaneers destroyed the English Company's forts on the
+bay, the English ambassador at Paris exacted such an enormous bill of
+damages that the Hudson Bay traders were enabled to build a stronger
+fortress up at Prince of Wales on the mouth of Churchill River than the
+French themselves possessed at Quebec on the St. Lawrence.  What--asked
+the rivals of the Company in London--had been done in return for such
+national protection?  France had discovered and explored a whole new
+world north of the Missouri.  What had the English done?  Where did the
+Western Sea of which Spain had possession in the South lie towards the
+North?  What lay between the Hudson Bay and that Western Sea?  Was
+there a Northwest passage by water through this region to Asia?  If
+not, was there an undiscovered world in the North, like Louisiana in
+the South?  There was talk of revoking the charter.  Then the Company
+awakened from its long sleep with a mighty stir.
+
+The annual boats that came out to Hudson Bay in the summer of 1769
+anchored on the offing, six miles from the gray walls of Fort Prince of
+Wales, and roared out a salute of cannon becoming the importance of
+ships that bore almost revolutionary commissions.  The fort cannon on
+the walls of Churchill River thundered their answer.  A pinnace came
+scudding over the waves from the ships.  A gig boat launched out from
+the fort to welcome the messengers.  Where the two met halfway, packets
+of letters were handed to Moses Norton, governor at Fort Prince of
+Wales, commanding him to despatch his most intrepid explorers for the
+discovery of unknown rivers, strange lands, rumored copper mines, and
+the mythical Northwest Passage that was supposed to lead directly to
+China.
+
+The fort lay on a spit of sand running out into the bay at the mouth of
+Churchill River.  It was three hundred yards long by three hundred
+yards wide, with four bastions, in three of which were stores and wells
+of water.  The fourth bastion contained the powder-magazine.  The walls
+were thirty feet wide at the bottom and twenty feet wide at the top, of
+hammer-dressed stone, mounted with forty great cannon.  A commodious
+stone house, furnished with all the luxuries of the chase, stood in the
+centre of the courtyard.  This was the residence of the governor.
+Offices, warehouses, barracks, and hunters' lodges were banked round
+the inner walls of the fort.  The garrison consisted of thirty-nine
+common soldiers and a few officers.  In addition, there hung about the
+fort the usual habitu�s of a Northern fur post,--young clerks from
+England, who had come out for a year's experience in the wilds;
+underpaid artisans, striving to mend their fortunes by illicit trade;
+hunters and _coureurs_ and _voyageurs_, living like Indians but with a
+strain of white blood that forever distinguished them from their
+comrades; stately Indian sachems, stalking about the fort with whiffs
+of contempt from their long calumets for all this white-man luxury; and
+a ragamuffin brigade,--squaws, youngsters, and beggars,--who subsisted
+by picking up food from the waste heap of the fort.
+
+The commission to despatch explorers to the inland country proved the
+sensation of a century at the fort.  Round the long mess-room table
+gathered officers and traders, intent on the birch-bark maps drawn by
+old Indian chiefs of an unknown interior, where a "Far-Off-Metal River"
+flowed down to the Northwest Passage.  Huge log fires blazed on the
+stone hearths at each end of the mess room.  Smoky lanterns and pine
+fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light
+from rafters that girded ceiling and walls.  On the floor of flagstones
+lay enormous skins of the chase--polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly.
+Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders.
+Draped across the walls were Company flags--an English ensign with the
+letters "H. B. C." painted in white on a red background, or in red on a
+white background.
+
+At the head of the table sat one of the most remarkable scoundrels
+known in the annals of the Company, Moses Norton, governor of Fort
+Prince of Wales, a full-blooded Indian, who had been sent to England
+for nine years to be educated and had returned to the fort to resume
+all the vices and none of the virtues of white man and red.
+Clean-skinned, copper-colored, lithe and wiry as a tiger cat, with the
+long, lank, oily black hair of his race, Norton bore himself with all
+the airs of a European princelet and dressed himself in the beaded
+buckskins of a savage.  Before him the Indians cringed as before one of
+their demon gods, and on the same principle.  Bad gods could do the
+Indians harm.  Good gods wouldn't.  Therefore, the Indians propitiated
+the bad gods; and of all Indian demons Norton was the worst.  The black
+arts of mediaeval poisoning were known to him, and he never scrupled to
+use them against an enemy.  The Indians thought him possessed of the
+power of the evil eye; but his power was that of arsenic or laudanum
+dropped in the food of an unsuspecting enemy.  Two of his wives, with
+all of whom he was inordinately jealous, had died of poison.  Against
+white men who might offend him he used more open means,--the triangle,
+the whipping post, the branding iron.  Needless to say that a man who
+wielded such power swelled the Company's profits and stood high in
+favor with the directors.  At his right hand lay an enormous bunch of
+keys.  These he carried with him by day and kept under his pillow by
+night.  They were the keys to the apartments of his many wives, for
+like all Indians Norton believed in a plurality of wives, and the life
+of no Indian was safe who refused to contribute a daughter to the
+harem.  The two master passions of the governor were jealousy and
+tyranny; and while he lived like a Turkish despot himself, he ruled his
+fort with a rod of iron and left the brand of his wrath on the person
+of soldier or officer who offered indignity to the Indian race.  It was
+a common thing for Norton to poison an Indian who refused to permit a
+daughter to join the collection of wives; then to flog the back off a
+soldier who casually spoke to one of the wives in the courtyard; and in
+the evening spend the entire supper hour preaching sermons on virtue to
+his men.  By a curious freak, Marie, his daughter, now a child of nine,
+inherited from her father the gentle qualities of the English life in
+which he had passed his youth.  She shunned the native women and was
+often to be seen hanging on her father's arm, as officers and governor
+smoked their pipes over the mess-room table.
+
+Near Norton sat another famous Indian, Matonabbee, the son of a slave
+woman at the fort, who had grown up to become a great ambassador to the
+native tribes for the English traders.  Measuring more than six feet,
+straight as a lance, supple as a wrestler, thin, wiry, alert, restless
+with the instinct of the wild creatures, Matonabbee was now in the
+prime of his manhood, chief of the Chipewyans at the fort, and master
+of life and death to all in his tribe.  It was Matonabbee whom the
+English traders sent up the Saskatchewan to invite the tribes of the
+Athabasca down to the bay.  The Athabascans listened to the message of
+peace with a treacherous smile.  At midnight assassins stole to his
+tent, overpowered his slave, and dragged the captive out.  Leaping to
+his feet, Matonabbee shouted defiance, hurled his assailants aside like
+so many straws, pursued the raiders to their tents, single-handed
+released his slave, and marched out unscathed.  That was the way
+Matonabbee had won the Athabascans for the Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+Officers of the garrison, bluff sea-captains, spinning yarns of iceberg
+and floe, soldiers and traders, made up the rest of the company.  Among
+the white men was one eager face,--that of Samuel Hearne, who was to
+explore the interior and now scanned the birch-bark drawings to learn
+the way to the "Far-off-Metal River."
+
+[Illustration: Samuel Hearne.]
+
+By November 6 all was in readiness for the departure of the explorer.
+Two Indian guides, who knew the way to the North, were assigned to
+Hearne; two European servants went with him to look after the
+provisions; and two Indian hunters joined the company.  In the gray
+mist of Northern dawn, with the stars still pricking through the frosty
+air, seven salutes of cannon awakened the echoes of the frozen sea.
+The gates of the fort flung open, creaking with the frost rust, and
+Hearne came out, followed by his little company, the dog bells of the
+long toboggan sleighs setting up a merry jingling as the huskies broke
+from a trot to a gallop over the snow-fields for the North.  Heading
+west-northwest, the band travelled swiftly with all the enthusiasm of
+untested courage.  North winds cut their faces like whip-lashes.  The
+first night out there was not enough snow to make a wind-break of the
+drifts; so the sleighs were piled on edge to windward, dogs and men
+lying heterogeneously in their shelter.  When morning came, one of the
+Indian guides had deserted.  The way became barer.  Frozen swamps
+across which the storm wind swept with hurricane force were succeeded
+by high, rocky barrens devoid of game, unsheltered, with barely enough
+stunted shrubbery for the whittling of chips that cooked the morning
+and night meals.  In a month the travellers had not accomplished ten
+miles a day.  Where deer were found the Indians halted to gorge
+themselves with feasts.  Where game was scarce they lay in camp,
+depending on the white hunters.  Within three weeks rations had
+dwindled to one partridge a day for the entire company.  The Indians
+seemed to think that Hearne's white servants had secret store of food
+on the sleighs.  The savages refused to hunt.  Then Hearne suspected
+some ulterior design.  It was to drive him back to the fort by famine.
+Henceforth, he noticed on the march that the Indians always preceded
+the whites and secured any game before his men could fire a shot.  One
+night toward the end of November the savages plundered the sleighs.
+Hearne awakened in amazement to see the company marching off, laden
+with guns, ammunition, and hatchets.  He called.  Their answer was
+laughter that set the woods ringing.  Hearne was now two hundred miles
+from the fort, without either ammunition or food.  There was nothing to
+do but turn back.  The weather was fair.  By snaring partridges, the
+white men obtained enough game to sustain them till they reached the
+fort on the 11th of December.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle.]
+
+The question now was whether to wait till spring or set out in the
+teeth of midwinter.  If Hearne left the fort in spring, he could not
+possibly reach the Arctic Circle till the following winter; and with
+the North buried under drifts of snow, he could not learn where lay the
+Northwest Passage.  If he left the fort in winter in order to reach the
+Arctic in summer, he must expose his guides to the risks of cold and
+starvation.  The Indians told of high, rocky barrens, across which no
+canoes could be carried.  They advised snow-shoe travel.  Obtaining
+three Chipewyans and two Crees as guides, and taking no white servants,
+Hearne once more set out, on February 23, 1770, for the "Far-Away-Metal
+River."  This time there was no cannonading.  The guns were buried
+under snow-drifts twenty feet deep, and the snow-shoes of the
+travellers glided over the fort walls to the echoing cheers of soldiers
+and governor standing on the ramparts.  The company travelled light,
+depending on chance game for food.  All wood that could be used for
+fire lay hidden deep under snow.  At wide intervals over the white
+wastes mushroom cones of snow told where a stunted tree projected the
+antlered branches of topmost bough through the depths of drift; but for
+the most part camp was made by digging through the shallowest snow with
+snow-shoes to the bottom of moss, which served the double purpose of
+fuel for the night kettle and bed for travellers.  In the hollow a
+wigwam was erected, with the door to the south, away from the north
+wind.  Snared rabbits and partridges supplied the food.  The way lay as
+before--west-northwest--along a chain of frozen lakes and rivers
+connecting Hudson Bay with the Arctic Ocean.  By April the marchers
+were on the margin of a desolate wilderness--the Indian region of
+"Little Sticks,"--known to white men as the Barren Lands, where dwarf
+trees project above the billowing wastes of snow like dismantled masts
+on the far offing of a lonely sea.  Game became scarcer.  Neither the
+round footprint of the hare nor the frost tracery of the northern
+grouse marked the snowy reaches of unbroken white.  Caribou had
+retreated to the sheltered woods of the interior; and a cleverer hunter
+than man had scoured the wide wastes of game.  Only the wolf pack
+roamed the Barren Lands.  It was unsafe to go on without food.  Hearne
+kept in camp till the coming of the goose month--April--when birds of
+passage wended their way north.  For three days rations consisted of
+snow water and pipes of tobacco.  The Indians endured the privations
+with stoical indifference, daily marching out on a bootless quest for
+game.  On the third night Hearne was alone in his tent.  Twilight
+deepened to night, night to morning.  Still no hunters returned.  Had
+he been deserted?  Not a sound broke the waste silence but the baying
+of the wolf pack.  Weak from hunger, Hearne fell asleep.  Before
+daylight he was awakened by a shout; and his Indians shambled over the
+drifts laden with haunches of half a dozen deer.  That relieved want
+till the coming of the geese.  In May Hearne struck across the Barren
+Lands.  By June the rotting snow clogged the snow-shoes.  Dog trains
+drew heavy, and food was again scarce.  For a week the travellers found
+nothing to eat but cranberries.  Half the company was ill from hunger
+when a mangy old musk-ox, shedding his fur and lean as barrel hoops,
+came scrambling over the rocks, sure of foot as a mountain goat.  A
+single shot brought him down.  In spite of the musky odor of which the
+coarse flesh reeked, every morsel of the ox was instantly devoured.
+Sometimes during their long fasts they would encounter a solitary
+Indian wandering over the rocky barren.  If he had arms, gun, or arrow,
+and carried skins of the chase, he was welcomed to camp, no matter how
+scant the fare.  Otherwise he was shunned as an outcast, never to be
+touched or addressed by a human being; for only one thing could have
+fed an Indian on the Barren Lands who could show no trophies of the
+chase, and that was the flesh of some human creature weaker than
+himself.  The outcast was a cannibal, condemned by an unwritten law to
+wander alone through the wastes.
+
+Snow had barely cleared from the Barren Lands when Hearne witnessed the
+great traverse of the caribou herds, marching in countless multitudes
+with a clicking of horns and hoofs from west to east for the summer.
+Indians from all parts of the North had placed themselves at rivers
+across the line of march to spear the caribou as they swam; and Hearne
+was joined by a company of six hundred savages.  Summer had dried the
+moss.  That gave abundance of fuel.  Caribou were plentiful.  That
+supplied the hunters with pemmican.  Hearne decided to pass the
+following winter with the Indians; but he was one white man among
+hundreds of savages.  Nightly his ammunition was plundered.  One of his
+survey instruments was broken in a wind storm.  Others were stolen.  It
+was useless to go on without instruments to take observations of the
+Arctic Circle; so for a second time Hearne was compelled to turn back
+to Fort Prince of Wales.  Terrible storms impeded the return march.
+His dog was frozen in the traces.  Tent poles were used for fire-wood;
+and the northern lights served as the only compass.  On midday of
+November 25, 1770, after eight months' absence, in which he had not
+found the "Far-Off-Metal River," Hearne reached shelter inside the fort
+walls.
+
+Beating through the gales of sleet and snow on the homeward march,
+Hearne had careened into a majestic figure half shrouded by the storm.
+The explorer halted before a fur-muffled form, six feet in its
+moccasins, erect as a mast pole, haughty as a king; and the gauntleted
+hand of the Indian chief went up to his forehead in sign of peace.  It
+was Matonabbee, the ambassador of the Hudson's Bay Company to the
+Athabascans, now returning to Fort Prince of Wales, followed by a long
+line of slave women driving their dog sleighs.  The two travellers
+hailed each other through the storm like ships at sea.  That night they
+camped together on the lee side of the dog sleighs, piled high as a
+wind-break; and Matonabbee, the famous courser of the Northern wastes,
+gave Hearne wise advice.  Women should be taken on a long journey, the
+Indian chief said; for travel must be swift through the deadly cold of
+the barrens.  Men must travel light of hand, trusting to chance game
+for food.  Women were needed to snare rabbits, catch partridges, bring
+in game shot by the braves, and attend to the camping.  And then in a
+burst of enthusiasm, perhaps warmed by Hearne's fine tobacco,
+Matonabbee, who had found the way to the Athabasca, offered to conduct
+the white man to the "Far-Off-Metal River" of the Arctic Circle.  The
+chief was the greatest pathfinder of the Northern tribes.  His offer
+was the chance of a lifetime.  Hearne could hardly restrain his
+eagerness till he reached the fort.  Leaving Matonabbee to follow with
+the slave women, the explorer hurried to Fort Prince of Wales, laid the
+plan before Governor Norton, and in less than two weeks from the day of
+his return was ready to depart for the unknown river that was to lead
+to the Northwest Passage.
+
+The weather was dazzlingly clear, with that burnished brightness of
+polished steel known only where unbroken sunlight meets unbroken snow
+glare.  On the 7th of December, 1770, Hearne left the fort, led by
+Matonabbee and followed by the slave Indians with the dog sleighs.  One
+of Matonabbee's wives lay ill; but that did not hinder the iron
+pathfinder.  The woman was wrapped in robes and drawn on a dog sleigh.
+There was neither pause nor hesitation.  If the woman recovered, good.
+If she died, they would bury her under a cairn of stones as they
+travelled.  Matonabbee struck directly west-northwest for some _caches_
+of provisions which he had left hidden on the trail.  The place was
+found; but the _caches_ had been rifled clean of food.  That did not
+stop Matonabbee.  Nor did he show the slightest symptoms of anger.  He
+simply hastened their pace the more for their hunger, recognizing the
+unwritten law of the wilderness--that starving hunters who had rifled
+the _cache_ had a right to food wherever they found it.  Day after day,
+stoical as men of bronze, the marchers reeled off the long white miles
+over the snowy wastes, pausing only for night sleep with evening and
+morning meals.  Here nibbled twigs were found; there the stamping
+ground of a deer shelter; elsewhere the small, cleft foot-mark like the
+ace of hearts.  But the signs were all old.  No deer were seen.  Even
+the black marble eye that betrays the white hare on the snow, and the
+fluffy bird track of the feather-footed northern grouse, grew rarer;
+and the slave women came in every morning empty-handed from untouched
+snares.  In spite of hunger and cold, Matonabbee remained good-natured,
+imperturbable, hard as a man of bronze, coursing with the winged speed
+of snow-shoes from morning till night without pause, going to a bed of
+rock moss on a meal of snow water and rising eager as an arrow to leave
+the bow-string for the next day's march.  For three days before
+Christmas the entire company had no food but snow.  Christmas was
+celebrated by starvation.  Hearne could not indulge in the despair of
+the civilized man's self-pity when his faithful guides went on without
+complaint.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun.--C. W.
+Mathers.]
+
+By January the company had entered the Barren Lands.  The Barren Lands
+were bare but for an occasional oasis of trees like an island of refuge
+in a shelterless sea.  In the clumps of dwarf shrubs, the Indians found
+signs that meant relief from famine--tufts of hair rubbed off on tree
+trunks, fallen antlers, and countless heart-shaped tracks barely
+puncturing the snow but for the sharp outer edge.  The caribou were on
+their yearly traverse east to west for the shelter of the inland woods.
+The Indians at once pitched camp.  Scouts went scouring to find which
+way the caribou herds were coming.  Pounds of snares were constructed
+of shrubs and saplings stuck up in palisades with scarecrows on the
+pickets round a V-shaped enclosure.  The best hunters took their
+station at the angle of the V, armed with loaded muskets and long,
+lank, and iron-pointed arrows.  Women and children lined the palisades
+to scare back high jumpers or strays of the caribou herd.  Then scouts
+and dogs beat up the rear of the fleeing herd, driving the caribou
+straight for the pound.  By a curious provision of nature, the male
+caribou sheds its antlers just as he leaves the Barren Lands for the
+wooded interior, where the horns would impede flight through brush, and
+he only leaves the woods for the bare open when the horns are grown
+enough to fight the annual battle to protect the herd from the wolf
+pack ravenous with spring hunger.  For one caribou caught in the pound
+by Hearne's Indians, a hundred of the herd escaped; for the caribou
+crossed the Barrens in tens of thousands, and Matonabbee's braves
+obtained enough venison for the trip to the "Far-Off-Metal River."
+
+The farther north they travelled the scanter became the growth of pine
+and poplar and willow.  Snow still lay heavy in April; but Matonabbee
+ordered a halt while there was still large enough wood to construct
+dugouts to carry provisions down the river.  The boats were built large
+and heavy in front, light behind.  This was to resist the ice jam of
+Northern currents.  The caribou hunt had brought other Indians to the
+Barren Lands.  Matonabbee was joined by two hundred warriors.  Though
+the tribes puffed the calumet of peace together, they drew their war
+hatchets when they saw the smoke of an alien tribe's fire rise against
+the northern sky.  A suspicion that he hardly dared to acknowledge
+flashed through Hearne's mind.  Eleven thousand beaver pelts were
+yearly brought down to the fort from the unknown river.  How did the
+Chipewyans obtain these pelts from the Eskimo?  What was the real
+reason of the Indian eagerness to conduct the white man to the
+"Far-Off-Metal River"?  The white man was not taken into the confidence
+of the Indian council; but he could not fail to draw his own
+conclusions.
+
+Scouts were sent cautiously forward to trail the path of the aliens who
+had lighted the far moss fire.  Women and children were ordered to head
+about for a rendezvous southwest on Lake Athabasca.  Carrying only the
+lightest supplies, the braves set out swiftly for the North on June 1.
+Mist and rain hung so heavily over the desolate moors that the
+travellers could not see twenty feet ahead.  In places the rocks were
+glazed with ice and scored with runnels of water.  Half the warriors
+here lost heart and turned back.  The others led by Hearne and
+Matonabbee crossed the iced precipices on hands and knees, with gun
+stocks strapped to backs or held in teeth.  On the 21st of June the sun
+did not set.  Hearne had crossed the Arctic Circle.  The sun hung on
+the southern horizon all night long.  Henceforth the travellers marched
+without tents.  During rain or snow storm, they took refuge under rocks
+or in caves.  Provisions turned mouldy with wet.  The moss was too
+soaked for fire.  Snow fell so heavily in drifting storms that Hearne
+often awakened in the morning to find himself almost immured in the
+cave where they had sought shelter.  Ice lay solid on the lakes in
+July.  Once, clambering up steep, bare heights, the travellers met a
+herd of a hundred musk-oxen scrambling over the rocks with the agility
+of squirrels, the spreading, agile hoof giving grip that lifted the
+hulking forms over all obstacles.  Down the bleak, bare heights there
+poured cataract and mountain torrent, plainly leading to some near
+river bed; but the thick gray fog lay on the land like a blanket.  At
+last a thunder-storm cleared the air; and Hearne saw bleak moors
+sloping north, bare of all growth but the trunks of burnt trees, with
+barren heights of rock and vast, desolate swamps, where the wild-fowl
+flocked in myriads.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago.]
+
+All count of day and night was now lost, for the sun did not set.
+Sometime between midnight and morning of July 12, 1771, with the sun as
+bright as noon, the lakes converged to a single river-bed a hundred
+yards wide, narrowing to a waterfall that roared over the rocks in
+three cataracts.  This, then, was the "Far-Off-Metal River."  Plainly,
+it was a disappointing discovery, this Coppermine River.  It did not
+lead to China.  It did not point the way to a Northwest Passage.  In
+his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North
+America had learned--that the Great Northwest was something more than a
+bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its
+own destiny.[1]
+
+But Hearne had no time to brood over disappointment.  The conduct of
+his rascally companions could no longer be misunderstood.  Hunters came
+in with game; but when the hungry slaves would have lighted a moss fire
+to cook the meat, the forbidding hand of a chief went up.  No fires
+were to be lighted.  The Indians advanced with whispers, dodging from
+stone to stone like raiders in ambush.  Spies went forward on tiptoe.
+Then far down-stream below the cataracts Hearne descried the domed
+tent-tops of an Eskimo band sound asleep; for it was midnight, though
+the sun was at high noon.  When Hearne looked back to his companions,
+he found himself deserted.  The Indians were already wading the river
+for the west bank, where the Eskimo had camped.  Hearne overtook his
+guides stripping themselves of everything that might impede flight or
+give hand-hold to an enemy, and daubing their skin with war-paint.
+Hearne begged Matonabbee to restrain the murderous warriors.  The great
+chief smiled with silent contempt.  He was too true a disciple of a
+doctrine which Indians' practised hundreds of years before white men
+had avowed it--the survival of the fit, the extermination of the weak,
+for any qualms of pity towards a victim whose death would contribute
+profit.  Wearing only moccasins and bucklers of hardened hide, armed
+with muskets, lances, and tomahawks, the Indians jostled Hearne out of
+their way, stole forward from stone to stone to within a gun length of
+the Eskimo, then with a wild war shout flung themselves on the
+unsuspecting sleepers.
+
+The Eskimo were taken unprepared.  They staggered from their tents,
+still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which
+they had never before heard.  The poor creatures fled in frantic
+terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt.  A young girl fell
+coiling at Hearne's feet like a wounded snake.  A well-aimed lance had
+pinioned the living form to earth.  She caught Hearne round the knees,
+imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back
+with jeers.  Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put
+their victim out of pain.  The rocks rang with the mockery of the
+torturers.  She was speared to death before Hearne's eyes.  On that
+scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer bear to
+look.  He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a
+nightmare.  Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide
+boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing
+down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless
+as stone was an old, old woman--probably a witch of the tribe--red-eyed
+as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of
+all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls.  There was a shout
+from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate;
+and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as
+insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack.  Odd commentary in our
+modern philosophies--this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned,
+weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by
+bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to
+jostle the Indian from the face of the New World.  Something more than
+a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a
+race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak,
+vacillating Hearne, weeping like a woman.
+
+Horror of the massacre robbed Hearne of all an explorer's exultation.
+A day afterward, on July 17, he stood on the shores of the Arctic
+Ocean,--the first white man to reach it overland in America.  Ice
+extended from the mouth of the river as far as eye could see.  Not a
+sign of land broke the endless reaches of cold steel, where the snow
+lay, and icy green, where pools of the ocean cast their reflection on
+the sky of the far horizon.  At one in the morning, with the sun
+hanging above the river to the south, Hearne formally took possession
+of the Arctic regions for the Hudson's Bay Company.  The same Company
+rules those regions to-day.  Not an eye had been closed for three days
+and nights.  Throwing themselves down on the wet shore, the entire band
+now slept for six hours.  The hunters awakened to find a musk-ox nosing
+over the mossed rocks.  A shot sent it tumbling over the cliffs.
+Whether it was that the moss was too wet for fuel to cook the meat, or
+the massacre had brutalized the men into beasts of prey, the Indians
+fell on the carcass and devoured it raw.[2]
+
+[Illustration: Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's Drawing,
+1733-47.]
+
+The retreat from the Arctic was made with all swiftness, keeping close
+to the Coppermine River.  For thirty miles from the sea not a tree was
+to be seen.  The river was sinuous and narrow, hemmed in by walls of
+solid rock, down which streamed cascades and mountain torrents.  On
+both sides of the high bank extended endless reaches of swamps and
+barrens.  Twenty miles from the sea Hearne found the copper mines from
+which the Indians made their weapons.  His guides were to join their
+families in the Athabasca country of the southwest, and thither
+Matonabbee now led the way at such a terrible pace that moccasins were
+worn to shreds and toe-nails torn from the feet of the marchers; and
+woe to the man who fell behind, for the wolf pack prowled on the rear.
+
+When the smoke of moss fires told of the wives' camp, the Indians
+halted to take the sweat bath of purification for the cleansing of all
+blood guilt from the massacre.  Heated stones were thrown into a small
+pool.  In this each Indian bathed himself, invoking his deity for
+freedom from all punishment for the deaths of the slain.[3]  By August
+the Indians had joined their wives.  By October they were on Lake
+Athabasca, which had already frozen.  Here one of the wives, in the
+last stages of consumption, could go no farther.  For a band short of
+food to halt on the march meant death to all.  The Northern wilderness
+has its grim unwritten law, inexorable and merciless as death.  For
+those who fall by the way there is no pity.  A whole tribe may not be
+exposed to death for the sake of one person.  Civilized nations follow
+the same principle in their quarantine.  Giving the squaw food and a
+tent, the Indians left her to meet her last enemy, whether death came
+by starvation or cold or the wolf pack.  Again and again the abandoned
+squaw came up with the marchers, weeping and begging their pity, only
+to fall from weakness.  But the wilderness has no pity; and so they
+left her.
+
+Christmas of 1771 was passed on Athabasca Lake, the northern lights
+rustling overhead with the crackling of a flag.  There was food in
+plenty; for the Athabasca was rich in buffalo meadows and beaver dams
+and moose yards.  On the lake shore Hearne found a little cabin, in
+which dwelt a solitary woman of the Dog Rib tribe who for eight months
+had not seen a soul.  Her band had been massacred.  She alone escaped
+and had lived here in hiding for almost a year.  In spring the Indians
+of the lake carried their furs to the forts of Hudson Bay.  With the
+Athabascans went Hearne, reaching Fort Prince of Wales on June 30,
+1772, after eighteen months' absence.
+
+He had discovered Coppermine River, the Arctic Ocean, and the Athabasca
+country,--a region in all as large as half European Russia.
+
+For his achievements Hearne received prompt promotion.  Within a year
+of his return to the fort, Governor Norton, the Indian bully, fell
+deadly ill.  In the agony of death throes, he called for his wives.
+The great keys to the apartments of the women were taken from his
+pillow, and the wives were brought in.  Norton lay convulsed with pain.
+One of the younger women began to sob.  An officer of the garrison took
+her hand to comfort her grief.  Norton's rolling eyes caught sight of
+the innocent conference between the officer and the young wife.  With a
+roar the dying bully hurled himself up in bed:--
+
+"I'll burn you alive!  I'll burn you alive," he shrieked.  With oaths
+on his lips he fell back dead.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Prince of Wales (Churchill), from Hearne's Account,
+1799 Edition.]
+
+Samuel Hearne became governor of the fort.  For ten years nothing
+disturbed the calm of his rule.  Marie, Norton's daughter, still lived
+in the shelter of the fort; the wives found consolation in other
+husbands; and Matonabbee continued the ambassador of the company to
+strange tribes.  One afternoon of August, 1782, the sleepy calm of the
+fort was upset by the sentry dashing in breathlessly with news that
+three great vessels of war with full-blown sails and carrying many guns
+were ploughing straight for Prince of Wales.  At sundown the ships
+swung at anchor six miles from the fort.  From their masts fluttered a
+foreign flag--the French ensign.  Gig boat and pinnace began sounding
+the harbor.  Hearne had less than forty men to defend the fort.  In the
+morning four hundred French troopers lined up on Churchill River, and
+the admiral, La Perouse, sent a messenger with demand of surrender.
+Hearne did not feel justified in exposing his men to the attack of
+three warships carrying from seventy to a hundred guns apiece, and to
+assault by land of four hundred troopers.  He surrendered without a
+blow.
+
+[Illustration: Beaver Coin of Hudson's Bay Company, melted from Old Tea
+Chests, one Coin representing one Beaver.]
+
+The furs were quickly transferred to the French ships, and the soldiers
+were turned loose to loot the fort.  The Indians fled, among them Moses
+Norton's gentle daughter, now in her twenty-second year.  She could not
+revert to the loathsome habits of savage life; she dared not go to the
+fort filled with lawless foreign soldiers; and she perished of
+starvation outside the walls.  Matonabbee had been absent when the
+French came.  He returned to find the fort where he had spent his life
+in ruins.  The English whom he thought invincible were defeated and
+prisoners of war.  Hearne, whom the dauntless old chief had led through
+untold perils, was a captive.  Matonabbee's proud spirit was broken.
+The grief was greater than he could bear.  All that living stood for
+had been lost.  Drawing off from observation, Matonabbee blew his
+brains out.
+
+
+[1] I have purposely avoided bringing up the dispute as to a mistake of
+some few degrees made by Hearne in his calculations--the point really
+being finical.
+
+[2] I am sorry to say that in pioneer border warfares I have heard of
+white men acting in a precisely similar beastly manner after some
+brutal conflict.  To be frank, I know of one case in the early days of
+Minnesota fur trade, where the irate fur trader killed and devoured his
+weak companion, not from famine, but sheer frenzy of brutalized
+passion.  Such naked light does wilderness life shed over our
+drawing-room philosophies of the triumphantly strong being the highest
+type of manhood.
+
+[3] Again the wilderness plunges us back to the primordial: if man be
+but the supreme beast of prey, whence this consciousness of blood guilt
+in these unschooled children of the wilds?
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+1780-1793
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES--HOW MACKENZIE
+  CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES AND LEWIS
+  AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM
+  MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+1780-1793
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES
+
+How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed
+across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the question of a
+Northwest Passage
+
+
+There is an old saying that if a man has the right mettle in him, you
+may stick him a thousand leagues in the wilderness on a barren rock and
+he will plant pennies and grow dollar bills.  In other words, no matter
+where or how, success will succeed.  No class illustrates this better
+than a type that has almost passed away--the old fur traders who were
+lords of the wilderness.  Cut off from all comfort, from all
+encouragement, from all restraint, what set of men ever had fewer
+incentives to go up, more temptations to go down?  Yet from the fur
+traders sprang the pioneer heroes of America.  When young Donald Smith
+came out--a raw lad--to America, he was packed off to eighteen years'
+exile on the desert coast of Labrador.  Donald Smith came out of the
+wilderness to become the Lord Strathcona of to-day.  Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts.  A clerk in a
+counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit
+setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for
+furs.  Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper
+Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he
+fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions
+is murdered, a second lamed, a third wounded.  In all this Alexander
+Mackenzie was successful while still in the prime of his manhood,--not
+more than thirty years of age; and the reward of his success was to be
+exiled to the sub-arctics of the Athabasca, six weeks' travel from
+another fur post,--not a likely field to play the hero.  Yet Mackenzie
+emerged from the polar wilderness bearing a name that ranks with
+Columbus and Carrier and La Salle.
+
+[Illustration: Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer.]
+
+Far north of the Missouri beyond the borderlands flows the
+Saskatchewan.  As far north again, beyond the Saskatchewan, flows
+another great river, the Athabasca, into Athabasca Lake, on whose blue
+shores to the north lies a little white-washed fort of some twenty log
+houses, large barn-like stores, a Catholic chapel, an Episcopal
+mission, and a biggish residence of pretence for the chief trader.
+This is Fort Chipewyan.  At certain seasons Indian tepees dot the
+surrounding plains; and bronze-faced savages, clad in the ill-fitting
+garments of white people, shamble about the stores, or sit haunched
+round the shady sides of the log houses, smoking long-stemmed pipes.
+These are the Chipewyans come in from their hunting-grounds; but for
+the most part the fort seems chiefly populated by regiments of husky
+dogs, shaggy-coated, with the sharp nose of the fox, which spend the
+long winters in harness coasting the white wilderness, and pass the
+summers basking lazily all day long except when the bell rings for fish
+time, when half a hundred huskies scramble wildly for the first meat
+thrown.
+
+A century ago Chipewyan was much the same as to-day, except that it lay
+on the south side of the lake.  Mails came only once in two years
+instead of monthly, and rival traders were engaged in the merry game of
+slitting each other's throats.  All together, it wasn't exactly the
+place for ambition to dream; but ambition was there in the person of
+Alexander Mackenzie, the young fur trader, dreaming what he hardly
+dared hope.  Business men fight shy of dreamers; so Mackenzie told his
+dreams to no one but his cousin Roderick, whom he pledged to secrecy.
+For fifty years the British government had offered a reward of 20,000
+pounds to any one who should discover a Northwest Passage between the
+Atlantic and the Pacific.  The hope of such a passageway had led many
+navigators on bootless voyages; and here was Mackenzie with the same
+bee in his bonnet.  To the north of Chipewyan he saw a mighty river,
+more than a mile wide in places, walled in by great ramparts, and
+flowing to unknown seas.  To the west he saw another river rolling
+through the far mountains.  Where did this river come from, and where
+did both rivers go?  Mackenzie was not the man to leave vital questions
+unanswered.  He determined to find out; but difficulties lay in the
+way.  He couldn't leave the Athabascan posts.  That was overcome by
+getting his cousin Roderick to take charge.  The Northwest Fur Company,
+which had succeeded the French fur traders of Quebec and Montreal when
+Canada passed from the hands of the French to the English, wouldn't
+assume any cost or risk for exploring unknown seas.  This was more
+niggardly than the Hudson's Bay Company, which had paid all cost of
+outlay for its explorers; but Mackenzie assumed risk and cost himself.
+Then the Indians hesitated to act as guides; so Mackenzie hired guides
+when he could, seized them by compulsion when he couldn't hire them,
+and went ahead without guides when they escaped.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for
+the Value of Three Beaver Skins.]
+
+May--the frog moon--and June--the bird's egg moon--were the festive
+seasons at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca.  Indian hunters came
+tramping in from the Barren Lands with toboggan loads of pelts drawn by
+half-wild husky dogs.  Woody Crees and Slaves and Chipewyans paddled
+across the lake in canoes laden to the gunwales with furs.  A world of
+white skin tepees sprang up like mushrooms round the fur post.  By June
+the traders had collected the furs, sorted and shipped them in
+flotillas of keel boat, barge, and canoe, east to Lake Superior and
+Montreal.  On the evening of June 2, 1789, Alexander Mackenzie, chief
+trader, had finished the year's trade and sent the furs to the Eastern
+warehouses of the Northwest Company, on Lake Superior, at Fort William,
+not far from where Radisson had first explored, and La V�rendrye
+followed.  Indians lingered round the fort of the Northern lake engaged
+in mad _boissons_, or drinking matches, that used up a winter's
+earnings in the spree of a single week.  Along the shore lay upturned
+canoes, keels red against the blue of the lake, and everywhere in the
+dark burned the red fires of the boatmen melting resin to gum the seams
+of the canoes; for the canoes were to be launched on a long voyage the
+next day.  Mackenzie was going to float down with the current of the
+Athabasca or Grand River, and find out where that great river emptied
+in the North.
+
+The crew must have spent the night in a last wild spree; for it was
+nine in the morning before all hands were ready to embark.  In
+Mackenzie's large birch canoe went four Canadian _voyageurs_, their
+Indian wives, and a German.  In other canoes were the Indian hunters
+and interpreters, led by "English Chief," who had often been to Hudson
+Bay.  Few provisions were taken.  The men were to hunt, the women to
+cook and keep the _voyageurs_ supplied with moccasins, which wore out
+at the rate of one pair a day for each man.  Traders bound for Slave
+Lake followed behind.  Only fifty miles were made the first day.
+Henceforth Mackenzie embarked his men at three and four in the morning.
+
+[Illustration:  Quill and Bead Work on Buckskin, Mackenzie River
+Indians.]
+
+The mouth of Peace River was passed a mile broad as it pours down from
+the west, and the boatmen _portaged_ six rapids the third day, one of
+the canoes, steered by a squaw more intent on her sewing than the
+paddles, going over the falls with a smash that shivered the bark to
+kindling-wood.  The woman escaped, as the current caught the canoe, by
+leaping into the water and swimming ashore with the aid of a line.  Ice
+four feet thick clung to the walls of the rampart shores, and this
+increased the danger of landing for a _portage_, the Indians whining
+out their complaints in exactly the tone of the wailing north wind that
+had cradled their lives--"Eduiy, eduiy!--It is hard, white man, it is
+hard!"  And harder the way became.  For nine nights fog lay so heavily
+on the river that not a star was seen.  This was followed by driving
+rain and wind.  Mackenzie hoisted a three-foot sail and cut over the
+water before the wind with the hiss of a boiling kettle.  Though the
+sail did the work of the paddles, it gave the _voyageurs_ no respite.
+Cramped and rain-soaked, they had to bail out water to keep the canoe
+afloat.  In this fashion the boats entered Slave Lake, a large body of
+water with one horn pointing west, the other east.  Out of both horns
+led unknown rivers.  Which way should Mackenzie go?  Low-lying
+marshlands--beaver meadows where the wattled houses of the beaver had
+stopped up the current of streams till moss overgrew the swamps and the
+land became quaking muskeg--lay along the shores of the lake.  There
+were islands in deep water, where caribou had taken refuge, travelling
+over ice in winter for the calves to be safe in summer from wolf pack
+and bear.  Mackenzie hired a guide from the Slave Indians to pilot the
+canoes over the lake; but the man proved useless.  Days were wasted
+poking through mist and rushes trying to find an outlet to the Grand
+River of the North.  Finally, English Chief lost his temper and
+threatened to kill the Slave Indian unless he succeeded in taking the
+canoes out of the lake.  The waters presently narrowed to half a mile;
+the current began to race with a hiss; sails were hoisted on
+fishing-poles; and Mackenzie found himself out of the rushes on the
+Grand River to the west of Slave Lake.
+
+[Illustration: Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake
+Superior.]
+
+Here pause was made at a camp of Dog Ribs, who took the bottom from the
+courage of Mackenzie's comrades by gruesome predictions that old age
+would come upon the _voyageurs_ before they reached salt water.  There
+were impassable falls ahead.  The river flowed through a land of famine
+peopled by a monstrous race of hostiles who massacred all Indians from
+the South.  The effect of these cheerful prophecies was that the Slave
+Lake guide refused to go on.  English Chief bodily put the recalcitrant
+into a canoe and forced him ahead at the end of a paddle.  Snow-capped
+mountains loomed to the west.  The river from Bear Lake was passed,
+greenish of hue like the sea, and the Slave Lake guide now feigned such
+illness that watch was kept day and night to prevent his escape.  The
+river now began to wind, with lofty ramparts on each side; and once, at
+a sharp bend in the current, Mackenzie looked back to see Slave Lake
+Indians following to aid the guide in escaping.  After that one of the
+white men slept with the fellow each night to prevent desertion; but
+during the confusion of a terrific thunder-storm, when tents and
+cooking utensils were hurled about their heads, the Slave succeeded in
+giving his watchers the slip.  Mackenzie promptly stopped at an
+encampment of strange Indians, and failing to obtain another guide by
+persuasion, seized and hoisted a protesting savage into the big canoe,
+and signalled the unwilling captive to point the way.  The Indians of
+the river were indifferent, if not friendly; but once Mackenzie
+discovered a band hiding their women and children as soon as the
+boatmen came in view.  The unwilling guide was forced ashore, as
+interpreter, and gifts pacified all fear.  But the incident left its
+impression on Mackenzie's comrades.  They had now been away from
+Chipewyan for forty days.  If it took much longer to go back, ice would
+imprison them in the polar wilderness.  Snow lay drifted in the
+valleys, and scarcely any game was seen but fox and grouse.  The river
+was widening almost to the dimensions of a lake, and when this was
+whipped by a north wind the canoes were in peril enough.  The four
+Canadians besought Mackenzie to return.  To return Mackenzie had not
+the slightest intention; but he would not tempt mutiny.  He promised
+that if he did not find the sea within seven days, he would go back.
+
+That night the sun hung so high above the southern horizon that the men
+rose by mistake to embark at twelve o'clock.  They did not realize that
+they were in the region of midnight sun; but Mackenzie knew and
+rejoiced, for he must be near the sea.  The next day he was not
+surprised to find a deserted Eskimo village.  At that sight the
+enthusiasm of the others took fire.  They were keen to reach the sea,
+and imagined that they smelt salt water.  In spite of the lakelike
+expanse of the river, the current was swift, and the canoes went ahead
+at the rate of sixty and seventy miles a day--if it could be called day
+when there was no night.  Between the 13th and 14th of July the
+_voyageurs_ suddenly awakened to find themselves and their baggage
+floating in rising water.  What had happened to the lake?  Their hearts
+took a leap; for it was no lake.  It was the tide.  They had found the
+sea.
+
+How hilariously jubilant were Mackenzie's men, one may guess from the
+fact that they chased whales all the next day in their canoes.  The
+whales dived below, fortunately; for one blow of a finback or sulphur
+bottom would have played skittles with the canoes.  Coming back from
+the whale hunt, triumphant as if they had caught a dozen finbacks, the
+men erected a post, engraving on it the date, July 14, 1789, and the
+names of all present.
+
+It had taken six weeks to reach the Arctic.  It took eight to return to
+Chipewyan, for the course was against stream, in many places tracking
+the canoes by a tow-line.  The beaver meadows along the shore impeded
+the march.  Many a time the quaking moss gave way, and the men sank to
+mid-waist in water.  While skirting close ashore, Mackenzie discovered
+the banks of the river to be on fire.  The fire was a natural tar bed,
+which the Indians said had been burning for centuries and which burns
+to-day as when Mackenzie found it.  On September 12, with a high sail
+up and a driving wind, the canoes cut across Lake Athabasca and reached
+the beach of Chipewyan at three in the afternoon, after one hundred and
+two days' absence.  Mackenzie had not found the Northwest Passage.  He
+had proved there was no Northwest Passage, and discovered the
+Mississippi of the north--Mackenzie River.
+
+[Illustration: Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River.]
+
+Mackenzie spent the long winter at Fort Chipewyan; but just as soon as
+the rivers cleared of ice, he took passage in the east-bound canoes and
+hurried down to the Grand Portage or Fort William on Lake Superior, the
+headquarters of the Northwest Company, where he reported his discovery
+of Mackenzie River.  His report was received with utter indifference.
+The company had other matters to think about.  It was girding itself
+for the life-and-death struggle with its rival, the Hudson's Bay
+Company.  "My expedition was hardly spoken of, but that is what I
+expected," he writes to his cousin.  But chagrin did not deter purpose.
+He asked the directors' permission to explore that other broad
+stream--Peace River--rolling down from the mountains.  His request was
+granted.  Winter saw him on furlough in England, studying astronomy and
+surveying for the next expedition.  Here he heard much of the Western
+Sea--the Pacific--that fired his eagerness.  The voyages of Cook and
+Hanna and Meares were on everybody's lips.  Spain and England and
+Russia were each pushing for first possession of the northwest coast.
+Mackenzie hurried back to his Company's fort on the banks of Peace
+River, where he spent a restless winter waiting for navigation to open.
+Doubts of his own ambitions began to trouble him.  What if Peace River
+did not lead to the west coast at all?  What if he were behind some
+other discoverer sent out by the Spaniards or the Russians?  "I have
+been so vexed of late that I cannot sit down to anything steadily," he
+confesses in a letter to his cousin.  Such a tissue-paper wall
+separates the aims of the real hero from those of the fool, that almost
+every ambitious man must pass through these periods of self-doubt
+before reaching the goal of his hopes.  But despondency did not benumb
+Mackenzie into apathy, as it has weaker men.
+
+By April he had shipped the year's furs from the forks of Peace River
+to Chipewyan.  By May his season's work was done.  He was ready to go
+up Peace River.  A birch canoe thirty feet long, lined with lightest of
+cedar, was built.  In this were stored pemmican and powder.  Alexander
+Mackay, a clerk of the company, was chosen as first assistant.  Six
+Canadian _voyageurs_--two of whom had accompanied Mackenzie to the
+Arctic--and two Indian hunters made up the party of ten who stepped
+into the canoes at seven in the evening of May 9, 1793.
+
+Peace River tore down from the mountains flooded with spring thaw.  The
+crew soon realized that paddles must be bent against the current of a
+veritable mill-race; but it was safer going against, than with, such a
+current, for unknown dangers could be seen from below instead of above,
+where suction would whirl a canoe on the rocks.  Keen air foretold the
+nearing mountains.  In less than a week snow-capped peaks had crowded
+the canoe in a narrow ca�on below a tumbling cascade where the river
+was one wild sheet of tossing foam as far as eye could see.  The
+difficulty was to land; for precipices rose on each side in a wall,
+down which rolled enormous boulders and land-slides of loose earth.  To
+_portage_ goods up these walls was impossible.  Fastening an
+eighty-foot tow-line to the bow, Mackenzie leaped to the declivity, axe
+in hand, cut foothold along the face of the steep cliff to a place
+where he could jump to level rock, and then, turning, signalled through
+the roar of the rapids for his men to come on.  The _voyageurs_ were
+paralyzed with fear.  They stripped themselves ready to swim if they
+missed the jump, then one by one vaulted from foothold to foothold
+where Mackenzie had cut till they came to the final jump across water.
+Here Mackenzie caught each on his shoulders as the _voyageurs_ leaped.
+The tow-line was then passed round trees growing on the edge of the
+precipice, and the canoe tracked up the raging cascade.  The waves
+almost lashed the frail craft to pieces.  Once a wave caught her
+sideways; the tow-line snapped like a pistol shot, for just one instant
+the canoe hung poised, and then the back-wash of an enormous boulder
+drove her bow foremost ashore, where the _voyageurs_ regained the
+tow-line.
+
+[Illustration: Slave Lake Indians.]
+
+The men had not bargained on this kind of work.  They bluntly declared
+that it was absurd trying to go up ca�ons with such cascades.
+Mackenzie paid no heed to the murmurings.  He got his crew to the top
+of the hill, spread out the best of a regale--including tea sweetened
+with sugar--and while the men were stimulating courage by a feast, he
+went ahead to reconnoitre the gorge.  Windfalls of enormous spruce
+trees, with a thickness twice the height of a man, lay on a steep
+declivity of sliding rock.  Up this climbed Mackenzie, clothes torn to
+tatters by devil's club (a thorn bush with spines like needles), boots
+hacked to pieces by the sharp rocks, and feet gashed with cuts.  The
+prospect was not bright.  As far as he could see the river was one
+succession of cataracts fifty feet wide walled in by stupendous
+precipices, down which rolled great boulders, shattering to pebbles as
+they fell.  The men were right.  No canoe could go up that stream.
+Mackenzie came back, set his men to repairing the canoe and making axe
+handles, to avoid the idleness that breeds mutiny, and sent Mackay
+ahead to see how far the rapids extended.  Mackay reported that the
+_portage_ would be nine miles over the mountain.
+
+Leading the way, axe in hand, Mackenzie began felling trees so that the
+trunks formed an outer railing to prevent a fall down the precipice.
+Up this trail they warped the canoe by pulling the tow-line round
+stumps, five men going in advance to cut the way, five hauling and
+pushing the canoe.  In one day progress was three miles.  By five in
+the afternoon the men were so exhausted that they went to bed--if bare
+ground with sky overhead could be called bed.  One thing alone
+encouraged them: as they rose higher up the mountain side, they saw
+that the green edges of the glaciers and the eternal snows projected
+over the precipices.  They were nearing the summit--they must surely
+soon cross the Divide.  The air grew colder.  For three days the
+choppers worked in their blanket coats.  When they finally got the
+canoe down to the river-bed, it was to see another range of impassable
+mountains barring the way westward.  All that kept Mackenzie's men from
+turning back was that awful _portage_ of nine miles.  Nothing ahead
+could be worse than what lay behind; so they embarked, following the
+south branch where the river forked.  The stream was swift as a
+cascade.  Half the crew walked to lighten the canoe and prevent grazing
+on the rocky bottoms.
+
+Once, at dusk, when walkers and paddlers happened to have camped on
+opposite shores, the marchers came dashing across stream, wading
+neck-high, with news that they had heard the firearms of Indian
+raiders.  Fires were put out, muskets loaded, and each man took his
+station at the foot of a tree, where all passed a sleepless night.  No
+hostiles appeared.  The noise was probably falling avalanches.  And
+once when Mackenzie and Mackay had gone ahead with the Indian
+interpreters, they came back to find that the canoe had disappeared.
+In vain they kindled fires, fired guns, set branches adrift on the
+swift current as a signal--no response came from the _voyageurs_.  The
+boatmen evidently did not wish to be found.  What Mackenzie's
+suspicions were one may guess.  It would be easier for the crew to
+float back down Peace River than pull against this terrific current
+with more _portages_ over mountains.  The Indians became so alarmed
+that they wanted to build a raft forthwith and float back to Chipewyan.
+The abandoned party had not tasted a bite of food for twenty-four
+hours.  They had not even seen a grouse, and in their powder horns were
+only a few rounds of ammunition.  Separating, Mackenzie and his Indian
+went up-stream, Mackay and his went down-stream, each agreeing to
+signal the other by gunshots if either found the canoe.  Barefooted and
+drenched in a terrific thunderstorm, Mackenzie wandered on till
+darkness shrouded the forest.  He had just lain down on a soaking couch
+of spruce boughs when the ricochetting echo of a gun set the boulders
+crashing down the precipices.  Hurrying down-stream, he found Mackay at
+the canoe.  The crew pretended that a leakage about the keel had caused
+delay; but the canoe did not substantiate the excuse.  Mackenzie said
+nothing; but he never again allowed the crew out of his sight on the
+east side of the mountains.
+
+So far there had been no sign of Indians among the mountains; and now
+the canoe was gliding along calm waters when savages suddenly sprang
+out of a thicket, brandishing spears.  The crew became panic-stricken;
+but Mackenzie stepped fearlessly ashore, offered the hostiles presents,
+shook hands, and made his camp with them.  The savages told him that he
+was nearing a _portage_ across the Divide.  One of them went with
+Mackenzie the next day as guide.  The river narrowed to a small
+tarn--the source of Peace River; and a short _portage_ over rocky
+ground brought the canoe to a second tarn emptying into a river that,
+to Mackenzie's disappointment, did not flow west, but south.  He had
+crossed the Divide, the first white man to cross the continent in the
+North; but how could he know whether to follow this stream?  It might
+lead east to the Saskatchewan.  As a matter of fact, he was on the
+sources of the Fraser, that winds for countless leagues south through
+the mountains before turning westward for the Pacific.
+
+Full of doubt and misgivings, uncertain whether he had crossed the
+Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river.  Snowy
+peaks were on every side.  Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy
+green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river
+was hemmed in by shadowy ca�ons with roaring cascades that compelled
+frequent _portage_.  Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to
+lighten the canoe and look out for danger; but fear had got in the
+marrow of his men.  They thought that he was trying to avoid risks to
+which he was exposing them; and they compelled him to embark, vowing,
+if they were to perish, he was to perish with them.
+
+To quiet their fears, Mackenzie embarked with them.  Barely had they
+pushed out when the canoe was caught by a sucking undercurrent which
+the paddlers could not stem--a terrific rip told them that the canoe
+had struck--the rapids whirled her sideways and away she went
+down-stream--the men jumped out, but the current carried them to such
+deep water that they were clinging to the gunwales as best they could
+when, with another rip, the stern was torn clean out of the canoe.  The
+blow sent her swirling--another rock battered the bow out--the keel
+flattened like a raft held together only by the bars.  Branches hung
+overhead.  The bowman made a frantic grab at these to stop the rush of
+the canoe--he was hoisted clear from his seat and dropped ashore.
+Mackenzie jumped out up to his waist in ice-water.  The steersman had
+yelled for each to save himself; but Mackenzie shouted out a
+countermand for every man to hold on to the gunwales.  In this fashion
+they were all dragged several hundred yards till a whirl sent the wreck
+into a shallow eddy.  The men got their feet on bottom, and the
+wreckage was hauled ashore.  During the entire crisis the Indians sat
+on top of the canoe, howling with terror.
+
+All the bullets had been lost.  A few were recovered.  Powder was
+spread out to dry; and the men flatly refused to go one foot farther.
+Mackenzie listened to the revolt without a word.  He got their clothes
+dry and their benumbed limbs warmed over a roaring fire.  He fed them
+till their spirits had risen.  Then he quietly remarked that the
+experience would teach them how to run rapids in the future.  Men of
+the North--to turn back?  Such a thing had never been known in the
+history of the Northwest Fur Company.  It would disgrace them forever.
+Think of the honor of conquering disaster.  Then he vowed that he would
+go ahead, whether the men accompanied him or not.  Then he set them to
+patching the canoe with oil-cloth and bits of bark; but large sheets of
+birch bark are rare in the Rockies; and the patched canoe weighed so
+heavily that the men could scarcely carry it.  It took them fourteen
+hours to make the three-mile _portage_ of these rapids.  The Indian
+from the mountain tribe had lost heart.  Mackenzie and Mackay watched
+him by turns at night; but the fellow got away under cover of darkness,
+the crew conniving at the escape in order to compel Mackenzie to turn
+back.  Finally the river wound into a large stream on the west side of
+the main range of the Rockies.  Mackenzie had crossed the Divide.
+
+For a week after crossing the Divide, the canoe followed the course of
+the river southward.  This was not what Mackenzie expected.  He sought
+a stream flowing directly westward, and was keenly alert for sign of
+Indian encampment where he might learn the shortest way to the Western
+Sea.  Once the smoke of a camp-fire rose through the bordering forest;
+but no sooner had Mackenzie's interpreters approached than the savages
+fired volley after volley of arrows and swiftly decamped, leaving no
+trace of a trail.  There was nothing to do but continue down the
+devious course of the uncertain river.  The current was swift and the
+outlook cut off by the towering mountains; but in a bend of the river
+they came on an Indian canoe drawn ashore.  A savage was just emerging
+from a side stream when Mackenzie's men came in view.  With a wild
+whoop, the fellow made off for the woods; and in a trice the narrow
+river was lined with naked warriors, brandishing spears and displaying
+the most outrageous hostility.  When Mackenzie attempted to land,
+arrows hissed past the canoe, which they might have punctured and sunk.
+Determined to learn the way westward from these Indians, Mackenzie
+tried strategy.  He ordered his men to float some distance from the
+savages.  Then he landed alone on the shore opposite the hostiles,
+having sent one of his interpreters by a detour through the woods to
+lie in ambush with fusee ready for instant action.  Throwing aside
+weapons, Mackenzie displayed tempting trinkets.  The warriors
+conferred, hesitated, jumped in the canoes, and came, backing stern
+foremost, toward Mackenzie.  He threw out presents.  They came ashore
+and were presently sitting by his side.
+
+From them he learned the river he was following ran for "many moons"
+through the "shining mountains" before it reached the "midday sun."  It
+was barred by fearful rapids; but by retracing the way back up the
+river, the white men could leave the canoe at a carrying place and go
+overland to the salt water in eleven days.  From other tribes down the
+same river, Mackenzie gathered similar facts.  He knew that the stream
+was misleading him; but a retrograde movement up such a current would
+discourage his men.  He had only one month's provisions left.  His
+ammunition had dwindled to one hundred and fifty bullets and thirty
+pounds of shot.  Instead of folding his hands in despondency, Mackenzie
+resolved to set the future at defiance and go on.  From the Indians he
+obtained promise of a man to guide him back.  Then he frankly laid all
+the difficulties before his followers, declaring that he was going on
+alone and they need not continue unless they voluntarily decided to do
+so.  His dogged courage was contagious.  The speech was received with
+huzzas, and the canoe was headed upstream.
+
+The Indian guide was to join Mackenzie higher upstream; but the
+reappearance of the white men when they had said they would not be back
+for "many moons" roused the suspicions of the savages.  The shores were
+lined with warriors who would receive no explanation that Mackenzie
+tried to give in sign language.  The canoe began to leak so badly that
+the boatmen had to spend half the time bailing out water; and the
+_voyageurs_ dared not venture ashore for resin.  Along the river cliff
+was a little three-cornered hut of thatched clay.  Here Mackenzie took
+refuge, awaiting the return of the savage who had promised to act as
+guide.  The three walls protected the rear, but the front of the hut
+was exposed to the warriors across the river; and the whites dared not
+kindle a fire that might serve as a target.  Two nights were passed in
+this hazardous shelter, Mackay and Mackenzie alternately lying in their
+cloaks on the wet rocks, keeping watch.  At midnight of the third day's
+siege, a rustling came from the woods to the rear and the boatmen's dog
+set up a furious barking.  The men were so frightened that they three
+times loaded the canoe to desert their leader, but something in the
+fearless confidence of the explorer deterred them.  As daylight sifted
+through the forest, Mackenzie descried a vague object creeping through
+the underbrush.  A less fearless man would have fired and lost all.
+Mackenzie dashed out to find the cause of alarm an old blind man,
+almost in convulsions from fear.  He had been driven from this river
+hut.  Mackenzie quieted his terror with food.  By signs the old man
+explained that the Indians had suspected treachery when the whites
+returned so soon; and by signs Mackenzie requested him to guide the
+canoe back up the river to the carrying place; but the old creature
+went off in such a palsy of fear that he had to be lifted bodily into
+the canoe.  The situation was saved.  The hostiles could not fire
+without wounding one of their own people; and the old man could explain
+the real reason for Mackenzie's return.  Rations had been reduced to
+two meals a day.  The men were still sulking from the perils of the
+siege when the canoe struck a stump that knocked a hole in the keel,
+"which," reports Mackenzie, laconically, "gave them all an opportunity
+to let loose their discontent without reserve."  Camp after camp they
+passed, which the old man's explanations pacified, till they at length
+came to the carrying place.  Here, to the surprise and delight of all,
+the guide awaited them.
+
+[Illustration: Good Hope, Mackenzie River.  Hudson's Bay Company Fort.]
+
+On July 4, provisions were _cached_, the canoe abandoned, and a start
+made overland westward, each carrying ninety pounds of provisions
+besides musket and pistols.  And this burden was borne on the rations
+of two scant meals a day.  The way was ridgy, steep, and obstructed by
+windfalls.  At cloud-line, the rocks were slippery as glass from
+moisture, and Mackenzie led the way, beating the drip from the branches
+as they marched.  The record was twelve miles the first day.  When it
+rained, the shelter was a piece of oil-cloth held up in an extemporized
+tent, the men crouching to sleep as best they could.  The way was well
+beaten and camp was frequently made for the night with strange Indians,
+from whom fresh guides were hired; but when he did not camp with the
+natives, Mackenzie watched his guide by sleeping with him.  Though the
+fellow was malodorous from fish oil and infested with vermin, Mackenzie
+would spread his cloak in such a way that escape was impossible without
+awakening himself.  No sentry was kept at night.  All hands were too
+deadly tired from the day's climb.  Once, in the impenetrable gloom of
+the midnight forest, Mackenzie was awakened by a plaintive chant in a
+kind of unearthly music.  A tribe was engaged in religious devotions to
+some woodland deity.  Totem poles of cedar, carved with the heads of
+animals emblematic of family clans, told Mackenzie that he was nearing
+the coast tribes.  Barefooted, with ankles swollen and clothes torn to
+shreds, they had crossed the last range of mountains within two weeks
+of leaving the inland river.  They now embarked with some natives for
+the sea.
+
+One can guess how Mackenzie's heart thrilled as they swept down the
+swift river--six miles an hour--past fishing weirs and Indian camps,
+till at last, far out between the mountains, he descried the narrow arm
+of the blue, limitless sea.  The canoe leaked like a sieve; but what
+did that matter?  At eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, July 20,
+the river carried them to a wide lagoon, lapped by a tide, with the
+seaweed waving for miles along the shore.  Morning fog still lay on the
+far-billowing ocean.  Sea otters tumbled over the slimy rocks with
+discordant cries.  Gulls darted overhead; and past the canoe dived the
+great floundering grampus.  There was no mistaking.  This was the
+sea--the Western Sea, that for three hundred years had baffled all
+search overland, and led the world's greatest explorers on a chase of a
+will-o'-the-wisp.  What Cartier and La Salle and La V�rendrye failed to
+do, Mackenzie had accomplished.
+
+But Mackenzie's position was not to be envied.  Ten starving men on a
+barbarous coast had exactly twenty pounds of pemmican, fifteen of rice,
+six of flour.  Of ammunition there was scarcely any.  Between home and
+their leaky canoe lay half a continent of wilderness and mountains.
+The next day was spent coasting the cove for a place to take
+observations.  Canoes of savages met the white men, and one impudent
+fellow kept whining out that he had once been shot at by men of
+Mackenzie's color.  Mackenzie took refuge for the night on an isolated
+rock which was barely large enough for his party to gain a foothold.
+The savages hung about pestering the boatmen for gifts.  Two white men
+kept guard, while the rest slept.  On Monday, when Mackenzie was
+setting up his instruments, his young Indian guide came, foaming at the
+mouth from terror, with news that the coast tribes were to attack the
+white men by hurling spears at the unsheltered rock.  The boatmen lost
+their heads and were for instant flight, anywhere, everywhere, in a
+leaky canoe that would have foundered a mile out at sea.  Mackenzie did
+not stir, but ordered fusees primed and the canoe gummed.  Mixing up a
+pot of vermilion, he painted in large letters on the face of the rock
+where they had passed the night:--
+
+"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July,
+one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three."
+
+The canoe was then headed eastward for the homeward trip.  Only once
+was the explorer in great danger on his return.  It was just as the
+canoe was leaving tide-water for the river.  The young Indian guide led
+him full tilt into the village of hostiles that had besieged the rock.
+Mackenzie was alone, his men following with the baggage.  Barely had he
+reached the woods when two savages sprang out, with daggers in hand
+ready to strike.  Quick as a flash, Mackenzie quietly raised his gun.
+They dropped back; but he was surrounded by a horde led by the impudent
+chief of the attack on the rock the first night on the sea.  One
+warrior grasped Mackenzie from behind.  In the scuffle hat and cloak
+came off; but Mackenzie shook himself free, got his sword out, and
+succeeded in holding the shouting rabble at bay till his men came.
+Then such was his rage at the indignity that he ordered his followers
+in line with loaded fusees, marched to the village, demanded the return
+of the hat and cloak, and obtained a peace-offering of fish as well.
+The Indians knew the power of firearms, and fell at his feet in
+contrition.  Mackenzie named this camp Rascal Village.
+
+At another time his men lost heart so completely over the difficulties
+ahead that they threw everything they were carrying into the river.
+Mackenzie patiently sat on a stone till they had recovered from their
+panic.  Then he reasoned and coaxed and dragooned them into the spirit
+of courage that at last brought them safely over mountain and through
+ca�on to Peace River.  On August 24, a sharp bend in the river showed
+them the little home fort which they had left four months before.  The
+joy of the _voyageurs_ fairly exploded.  They beat their paddles on the
+canoe, fired off all the ammunition that remained, waved flags, and set
+the cliffs ringing with shouts.
+
+Mackenzie spent the following winter at Chipewyan, despondent and
+lonely.  "What a situation, starving and alone!" he writes to his
+cousin.  The hard life was beginning to wear down the dauntless spirit.
+"I spend the greater part of my time in vague speculations. . . .  In
+fact my mind was never at ease, nor could I bend it to my wishes.
+Though I am not superstitious, my dreams cause me great annoyance.  I
+scarcely close my eyes without finding myself in company with the dead."
+
+The following winter Mackenzie left the West never to return.  The
+story of his travels was published early in the nineteenth century, and
+he was knighted by the English king.  The remainder of his life was
+spent quietly on an estate in Scotland, where he died in 1820.
+
+[Illustration: The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight
+Sun.--C. W. Mathers.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+1803-1806
+
+LEWIS AND CLARK
+
+The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend the
+Columbia to the Pacific--Exciting Adventures on the Ca�ons of the
+Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone--Lewis'
+Escape from Hostiles
+
+
+The spring of 1904 witnessed the centennial celebration of an area as
+large as half the kingdoms of Europe, that has the unique distinction of
+having transferred its allegiance to three different flags within
+twenty-four hours.
+
+At the opening of the nineteenth century Spain had ceded all the region
+vaguely known as Louisiana back to France, and France had sold the
+territory, to the United States; but post-horse and stage of those old
+days travelled slowly.  News of Spain's cession and France's sale reached
+Louisiana almost simultaneously.  On March 9, 1804, the Spanish grandees
+of St. Louis took down their flag and, to the delight of Louisiana, for
+form's sake erected French colors.  On March 10, the French flag was
+lowered for the emblem that has floated over the Great West ever
+since--the stars and stripes.  How vast was the new territory acquired,
+the eastern states had not the slightest conception.  As early as 1792
+Captain Gray, of the ship _Columbia_, from Boston, had blundered into the
+harbor of a vast river flowing into the Pacific.  What lay between this
+river and that other great river on the eastern side of the
+mountains--the Missouri?  Jefferson had arranged with John Ledyard of
+Connecticut, who had been with Captain Cook on the Pacific, to explore
+the northwest coast of America by crossing Russia overland; but Russia
+had similar designs for herself, and stopped Ledyard on the way.  In 1803
+President Jefferson asked Congress for an appropriation to explore the
+Northwest by way of the Missouri.  Now that the wealth of the West is
+beyond the estimate of any figure, it seems almost inconceivable that
+there were people little-minded enough to haggle over the price paid for
+Louisiana--$15,000,000--and to object to the appropriation required for
+its exploration--$2500; but fortunately the world goes ahead in spite of
+hagglers.
+
+May of 1804 saw Captain Meriwether Lewis, formerly secretary to President
+Jefferson, and Captain William Clark of Virginia launch out from Wood
+River opposite St. Louis, where they had kept their men encamped all
+winter on the east side of the Mississippi, waiting until the formal
+transfer of Louisiana for the long journey of exploration to the sources
+of the Missouri and the Columbia.  Their escort consisted of twenty
+soldiers, eleven _voyageurs_, and nine frontiersmen.  The main craft was
+a keel boat fifty-five feet long, of light draft, with square-rigged sail
+and twenty-two oars, and tow-line fastened to the mast pole to track the
+boat upstream through rapids.  An American flag floated from the prow,
+and behind the flag the universal types of progress everywhere--goods for
+trade and a swivel-gun.  Horses were led alongshore for hunting, and two
+pirogues--sharp at prow, broad at stern, like a flat-iron or a
+turtle--glided to the fore of the keel boat.
+
+[Illustration: Captain Meriwether Lewis.]
+
+The Missouri was at flood tide, turbid with crumbling clay banks and
+great trees torn out by the roots, from which keel boat and pirogues
+sheered safely off.  For the first time in history the Missouri resounded
+to the Fourth of July guns; and round camp-fire the men danced to the
+strains of a _voyageur's_ fiddle.  Usually, among forty men is one
+traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife;
+but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the
+lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the
+Platte, down the Osage, down the Missouri, with canoe loads of furs for
+St. Louis.  These men foregathered with the _voyageurs_ and told only too
+true stories of the dangers ahead.  Fires kindled on the banks of the
+river called neighboring Indians to council.  Council Bluffs commemorates
+one conference, of which there were many with Iowas and Omahas and
+Ricarees and Sioux.  Pause was made on the south side of the Missouri to
+visit the high mound where Blackbird, chief of the Omahas, was buried
+astride his war horse that his spirit might forever watch the French
+_voyageurs_ passing up and down the river.
+
+[Illustration: Captain William Clark.]
+
+By October the explorers were sixteen hundred miles north of St. Louis,
+at the Mandan villages near where Bismarck stands to-day.  The Mandans
+welcomed the white men; but the neighboring tribes of Ricarees were
+insolent.  "Had I these white warriors on the upper plains," boasted a
+chief to Charles Mackenzie, one of the Northwest Fur Company men from
+Canada, "my young men on horseback would finish them as they would so
+many wolves; for there are only two sensible men among them, the worker
+of iron [blacksmith] and the mender of guns."  Four Canadian traders had
+already been massacred by this chief.  Captain Lewis knew that his
+company must winter on the east side of the mountains, and there were a
+dozen traders--Hudson Bay and Nor'westers--on the ground practising all
+the unscrupulous tricks of rivals, Nor'westers driving off Hudson Bay
+horses, Hudson Bay men driving off Nor'-westers', to defeat trade; so
+Captain Lewis at once had a fort constructed.  It was triangular in
+shape, the two converging walls consisting of barracks with a loopholed
+bastion at the apex, the base being a high wall of strong pickets where
+sentry kept constant guard.  Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to
+secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians;
+but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he
+luckily engaged an old Nor'wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife,
+Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.[1]  On
+Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan;
+and all that night the men danced hilariously.  On New Years of 1805, the
+white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one _voyageur_ danced "on his
+head" to the uproarious applause of the savages.  All winter the men
+joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican.  In February,
+work was begun on the small boats for the ascent of the Missouri.  By the
+end of March, the river had cleared of ice, and a dozen men were sent
+back to St. Louis.
+
+At five, in the afternoon of April 7, six canoes and two pirogues were
+pushed out on the Missouri.  Sails were hoisted; a cheer from the
+Canadian traders and Indians standing on the shore--and the boats glided
+up the Missouri with flags flying from foremost prow.  Hitherto Lewis and
+Clark had passed over travelled ground.  Now they had set sail for the
+Unknown.  Within a week they had passed the Little Missouri, the height
+of land that divides the waters of the Missouri from those of the
+Saskatchewan, and the great Yellowstone River, first found by wandering
+French trappers and now for the first time explored.  The current of the
+Missouri grew swifter, the banks steeper, and the use of the tow-line
+more frequent.  The voyage was no more the holiday trip that it had been
+all the way from St. Louis.  Hunters were kept on the banks to forage for
+game, and once four of them came so suddenly on an open-mouthed,
+ferocious old bear that he had turned hunter and they hunted before guns
+could be loaded; and the men saved themselves only by jumping twenty feet
+over the bank into the river.
+
+For miles the boats had to be tracked up-stream by the tow-line.  The
+shore was so steep that it offered no foothold.  Men and stones slithered
+heterogeneously down the sliding gravel into the water.  Moccasins wore
+out faster than they could be sewed; and the men's feet were cut by
+prickly-pear and rock as if by knives.  On Sunday, May 26, when Captain
+Lewis was marching to lighten the canoes, he had just climbed to the
+summit of a high, broken cliff when there burst on his glad eyes a first
+glimpse of the far, white "Shining Mountains" of which the Indians told,
+the Rockies, snowy and dazzling in the morning sun.  One can guess how
+the weather-bronzed, ragged man paused to gaze on the glimmering summits.
+Only one other explorer had ever been so far west in this region--young
+De la V�rendrye, fifty years before; but the Frenchman had been compelled
+to turn back without crossing the mountains, and the two Americans were
+to assail and conquer what had proved an impassable barrier.  The
+Missouri had become too deep for poles, too swift for paddles; and the
+banks were so precipitous that the men were often poised at dizzy heights
+above the river, dragging the tow-line round the edge of rock and crumbly
+cliff.  Captain Lewis was leading the way one day, crawling along the
+face of a rock wall, when he slipped.  Only a quick thrust of his
+spontoon into the cliff saved him from falling almost a hundred feet.  He
+had just struck it with terrific force into the rock, where it gave him
+firm handhold, when he heard a voice cry, "Good God, Captain, what shall
+I do?"
+
+[Illustration: Tracking Up-stream.]
+
+Windsor, a frontiersman, had slipped to the very verge of the rock, where
+he lay face down with right arm and leg completely over the precipice,
+his left hand vainly grabbing empty air for grip of anything that would
+hold him back.  Captain Lewis was horrified, but kept his presence of
+mind; for the man's life hung by a thread.  A move, a turn, the slightest
+start of alarm to disturb Windsor's balance--and he was lost.  Steadying
+his voice, Captain Lewis shouted back, "You're in little danger.  Stick
+your knife in the cliff to hoist yourself up."
+
+With the leverage of the knife, Windsor succeeded in lifting himself back
+to the narrow ledge.  Then taking off his moccasins, he crawled along the
+cliff to broader foothold.  Lewis sent word for the crews to wade the
+margin of the river instead of attempting this pass--which they did,
+though shore water was breast high and ice cold.
+
+[Illustration: Typical Mountain Trapper.]
+
+The Missouri had now become so narrow that it was hard to tell which was
+the main river and which a tributary; so Captain Lewis and four men went
+in advance to find the true course.  Leaving camp at sunrise, Captain
+Lewis was crossing a high, bare plain, when he heard the most musical of
+all wilderness sounds--the far rushing that is the voice of many waters.
+Far above the prairie there shimmered in the morning sun a gigantic plume
+of spray.  Surely this was the Great Falls of which the Indians told.
+Lewis and his men broke into a run across the open for seven miles, the
+rush of waters increasing to a deafening roar, the plume of spray to
+clouds of foam.  Cliffs two hundred feet high shut off the view.  Down
+these scrambled Lewis, not daring to look away from his feet till safely
+at bottom, when he faced about to see the river compressed by sheer
+cliffs over which hurled a white cataract in one smooth sheet eighty feet
+high.  The spray tossed up in a thousand bizarre shapes of wind-driven
+clouds.  Captain Lewis drew the long sigh of the thing accomplished.  He
+had found the Great Falls of the Missouri.
+
+[Illustration: The Discovery of the Great Falls.]
+
+Seating himself on the rock, he awaited his hunters.  That night they
+camped under a tree near the falls.  Morning showed that the river was
+one succession of falls and rapids for eighteen miles.  Here was indeed a
+stoppage to the progress of the boats.  Sending back word to Captain
+Clark of the discovery of the falls, Lewis had ascended the course of the
+cascades to a high hill when he suddenly encountered a herd of a thousand
+buffalo.  It was near supper-time.  Quick as thought, Lewis fired.  What
+was his amazement to see a huge bear leap from the furze to pounce on the
+wounded quarry; and what was Bruin's amazement to see the unusual
+spectacle of a thing as small as a man marching out to contest possession
+of that quarry?  Man and bear reared up to look at each other.  Bear had
+been master in these regions from time immemorial.  Man or beast--which
+was to be master now?  Lewis had aimed his weapon to fire again, when he
+recollected that it was not loaded; and the bear was coming on too fast
+for time to recharge.  Captain Lewis was a brave man and a dignified man;
+but the plain was bare of tree or brush, and the only safety was
+inglorious flight.  But if he had to retreat, the captain determined that
+he _would_ retreat only at a walk.  The rip of tearing claws sounded from
+behind, and Lewis looked over his shoulder to see the bear at a hulking
+gallop, open-mouthed,--and off they went, explorer and exploited, in a
+sprinting match of eighty yards, when the grunting roar of pursuer told
+pursued that the bear was gaining.  Turning short, Lewis plunged into the
+river to mid-waist and faced about with his spontoon at the bear's nose.
+A sudden turn is an old trick with all Indian hunters; the bear
+floundered back on his haunches, reconsidered the sport of hunting this
+new animal, man, and whirled right about for the dead buffalo.
+
+[Illustration: Fighting a Grizzly.]
+
+It took the crews from the 15th to the 25th of June to _portage_ past the
+Great Falls.  Cottonwood trees yielded carriage wheels two feet in
+diameter, and the masts of the pirogues made axletrees.  On these
+wagonettes the canoes were dragged across the _portage_.  It was hard,
+hot work.  Grizzlies prowled round the camp at night, wakening the
+exhausted workers.  The men actually fell asleep on their feet as they
+toiled, and spent half the night double-soling their torn moccasins, for
+the cactus already had most of the men limping from festered feet.  Yet
+not one word of complaint was uttered; and once, when the men were camped
+on a green along the _portage_, a _voyageur_ got out his fiddle, and the
+sore feet danced, which was more wholesome than moping or poulticing.
+The boldness of the grizzlies was now explained.  Antelope and buffalo
+were carried over the falls.  The bears prowled below for the carrion.
+
+After failure to construct good hide boats, two other craft, twenty-five
+and thirty-three feet long, were knocked together, and the crews launched
+above the rapids for the far Shining Mountains that lured like a
+mariner's beacon.  Night and day, when the sun was hot, came the
+boom-boom as of artillery from the mountains.  The _voyageurs_ thought
+this the explosion of stones, but soon learned to recognize the sound of
+avalanche and land-slide.  The river became narrower, deeper, swifter, as
+the explorers approached the mountains.  For five miles rocks rose on
+each side twelve hundred feet high, sheer as a wall.  Into this shadowy
+ca�on, silent as death, crept the boats of the white men, vainly
+straining their eyes for glimpse of egress from the watery defile.  A
+word, a laugh, the snatch of a _voyageur's_ ditty, came back with elfin
+echo, as if spirits hung above the dizzy heights spying on the intruders.
+Springs and tenuous, wind-blown falls like water threads trickled down
+each side of the lofty rocks.  The water was so deep that poles did not
+touch bottom, and there was not the width of a foot-hold between water
+and wall for camping ground.  Flags were unfurled from the prows of the
+boats to warn marauding Indians on the height above that the _voyageurs_
+were white men, not enemies.  Darkness fell on the ca�on with the great
+hushed silence of the mountains; and still the boats must go on and on in
+the darkness, for there was no anchorage.  Finally, above a small island
+in the middle of the river, was found a tiny camping ground with
+pine-drift enough for fire-wood.  Here they landed in the pitchy dark.
+They had entered the Gates of the Rockies on the 19th of July.  In the
+morning bighorn and mountain goat were seen scrambling along the ledges
+above the water.  On the 25th the Three Forks of the Missouri were
+reached.  Here the Indian woman, Sacajawea, recognized the ground and
+practically became the guide of the party, advising the two explorers to
+follow the south fork or the Jefferson, as that was the stream which her
+tribe followed when crossing the mountains to the plains.
+
+[Illustration: Packer carrying Goods across Portage.]
+
+It now became absolutely necessary to find mountain Indians who would
+supply horses and guide the white men across the Divide.  In the hope of
+finding the Indian trail, Captain Lewis landed with two men and preceded
+the boats.  He had not gone five miles when to his sheer delight he saw a
+Snake Indian on horseback.  Ordering his men to keep back, he advanced
+within a mile of the horseman and three times spread his blanket on the
+ground as a signal of friendship.  The horseman sat motionless as bronze.
+Captain Lewis went forward, with trinkets held out to tempt a parley, and
+was within a few hundred yards when the savage wheeled and dashed off.
+Lewis' men had disobeyed orders and frightened the fellow by advancing.
+Deeply chagrined, Lewis hoisted an American flag as sign of friendship
+and continued his march.  Tracks of horses were followed across a bog,
+along what was plainly an Indian road, till the sources of the Missouri
+became so narrow that one of the men put a foot on each side and thanked
+God that he had lived to bestride the Missouri.  Stooping, all drank from
+the crystal spring whose waters they had traced for three thousand miles
+from St. Louis.  Following a steep declivity, they were presently
+crossing the course of a stream that flowed west and must lead to some
+branch of the Columbia.
+
+[Illustration: Spying on an Enemy's Fort.]
+
+Suddenly, on the cliff in front, Captain Lewis discovered two squaws, an
+Indian, and some dogs.  Unfurling his flag, he advanced.  The Indians
+paused, then dashed for the woods.  Lewis tried to tie some presents
+round the dogs' necks as a peace-offering, but the curs made off after
+their master.  The white men had not proceeded a mile before they came to
+three squaws, who never moved but bowed their heads to the ground for the
+expected blow that would make them captives.  Throwing down weapons,
+Lewis pulled up his sleeve to show that he was white.  Presents allayed
+all fear, and the squaws had led him two miles toward their camp when
+sixty warriors came galloping at full speed with arrows levelled.  The
+squaws rushed forward, vociferating and showing their presents.  Three
+chiefs at once dismounted, and fell on Captain Lewis with such greasy
+embraces of welcome that he was glad to end the ceremony.  Pipes were
+smoked, presents distributed, and the white men conducted to a great
+leathern lodge, where Lewis announced his mission and prepared the
+Indians for the coming of the main force in the boats.
+
+[Illustration: Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies.]
+
+The Snakes scarcely knew whether to believe the white man's tale.  The
+Indian camp was short of provisions, and Lewis urged the warriors to come
+back up the trail to meet the advancing boats.  The braves hesitated.
+Cameahwait, the chief, harangued till a dozen warriors mounted their
+horses and set out, Lewis and his men each riding behind an Indian.
+Captain Clark could advance only slowly, and the Indians with Lewis grew
+suspicious as they entered the rocky denies without meeting the
+explorers' party.  Half the Snakes turned back.  Among those that went on
+were three women.  To demonstrate good faith, Lewis again mounted a horse
+behind an Indian, though the bare-back riding over rough ground at a mad
+pace was almost jolting his bones apart.  A spy came back breathless with
+news for the hungry warriors that one of the white hunters had killed a
+deer, and the whole company lashed to a breakneck gallop that nearly
+finished Lewis, who could only cling for dear life to the Indian's waist.
+The poor wretches were so ravenous that they fell on the dead deer and
+devoured it raw.  It was here that Lewis expected the boats.  They were
+not to be seen.  The Indians grew more distrustful.  The chief at once
+put fur collars, after the fashion of Indian dress, round the white men's
+shoulders.  As this was plainly a trick to conceal the whites in case of
+treachery on their part, Lewis at once took off his hat and placed it on
+the chief's head.  Then he hurried the Indians along, lest they should
+lose courage completely.  To his mortification, Captain Clark did not
+appear.  To revive the Indians' courage, the white men then passed their
+guns across to the Snakes, signalling willingness to suffer death if the
+Indians discovered treachery.  That night all the Indians hid in the
+woods but five, who slept on guard round the whites.  If anything had
+stopped Clark's advance, Lewis was lost.  Though neither knew it, Lewis
+and Clark were only four miles apart, Clark, Chaboneau, the guide, and
+Sacajawea, the Indian woman, were walking on the shore early in the
+morning, when the squaw began to dance with signs of the most extravagant
+joy.  Looking ahead, Clark saw one of Lewis' men, disguised as an Indian,
+leading a company of Snake warriors that the squaw had recognized as her
+own people, from whom she had been wrested when a child.  The Indians
+broke into songs of delight, and Sacajawea, dashing through the crowd,
+threw her arms round an Indian woman, sobbing and laughing and exhibiting
+all the hysterical delight of a demented creature.  Sacajawea and the
+woman had been playmates in childhood and had been captured in the same
+war; but the Snake woman had escaped, while Sacajawea became a slave and
+married the French guide.
+
+Meanwhile, Captain Clark was being welcomed by Lewis and the chief,
+Cameahwait.  Sacajawea was called to interpret.  Cameahwait rose to
+speak.  The poor squaw flung herself on him with cries of delight.  In
+the chief of the Snakes she had recognized her brother.  Laced coats,
+medals, flags, and trinkets were presented to the Snakes; but though
+willing enough to act as guides, the Indians discouraged the explorers
+about going on in boats.  The western stream was broken for leagues by
+terrible rapids walled in with impassable precipices.  Boats were
+abandoned and horses bought from the Snakes.  The white men set their
+faces northwestward, the southern trail, usually followed by the Snakes,
+leading too much in the direction of the Spanish settlements.  Game grew
+so scarce that by September the men were without food and a colt was
+killed for meat.
+
+By October the company was reduced to a diet of dog; but the last Divide
+had been crossed.  Horses were left with an Indian chief of the
+Flatheads, and the explorers glided down the Clearwater, leading to the
+Columbia, in five canoes and one pilot boat.  Great was the joy in camp
+on November 8, 1805; for the boats had passed the last _portage_ of the
+Columbia.  When heavy fog rose, there burst on the eager gaze of the
+_voyageurs_ the shining expanse of the Pacific.  The shouts of the
+jubilant _voyageurs_ mingled with the roar of ocean breakers.  Like
+Alexander Mackenzie of the far North a decade before, Lewis and Clark had
+reached the long-sought Western Sea.  They had been first up the
+Missouri, first across the middle Rockies, and first down the Columbia to
+the Pacific.
+
+Seven huts, known as Fort Clatsop, were knocked up on the south side of
+the Columbia's harbor for winter quarters; and a wretched winter the
+little fort spent, beleaguered not by hostiles, but by such inclement
+damp that all the men were ill before spring and their very leather suits
+rotted from their backs.  Many a time, coasting the sea, were they
+benighted.  Spreading mats on the sand, they slept in the drenching rain.
+Unused to ocean waters, the inland voyageurs became deadly seasick.
+Once, when all were encamped on the shore, an enormous tidal wave broke
+over the camp with a smashing of log-drift that almost crushed the boats.
+Nez Perces and Flatheads had assisted the white men after the Snake
+guides had turned back.  Clatsops and Chinooks were now their neighbors.
+Christmas and New Year of 1806 were celebrated by a discharge of
+firearms.  No boats chanced to touch at the Columbia during the winter.
+The time was passed laying up store of elk meat and leather; for the
+company was not only starving, but nearly naked.  The Pacific had been
+reached on November 14, 1805.  Fort Clatsop was evacuated on the
+afternoon of March 23, 1806.
+
+The goods left to trade for food and horses when Lewis and Clark departed
+from the coast inland had dwindled to what could have been tied in two
+handkerchiefs; but necessity proved the mother of invention, and the men
+cut the brass buttons from their tattered clothes and vended brass
+trinkets to the Indians.  The medicine-chest was also sacrificed, every
+Indian tribe besieging the two captains for eye-water, fly-blisters, and
+other patent wares.  The poverty of the white man roused the insolence of
+the natives on the return over the mountains.  Rocks were rolled down on
+the boatmen at the worst _portages_ by aggressive Indians; and once, when
+the hungry _voyageurs_ were at a meal of dog meat, an Indian impudently
+flung a live pup straight at Captain Lewis' plate.  In a trice the pup
+was back in the fellow's face; Lewis had seized a weapon; and the
+crestfallen aggressor had taken ignominiously to his heels.  When they
+had crossed the mountains, the forces divided into three parties, two to
+go east by the Yellowstone, one under Lewis by the main Missouri.
+
+Somewhere up the height of land that divides the southern waters of the
+Saskatchewan from the northern waters of the Missouri, the tracks of
+Minnetaree warriors were found.  These were the most murderous raiders of
+the plains.  Over a swell of the prairie Lewis was startled to see a band
+of thirty horses, half of them saddled.  The Indians were plainly on the
+war-path, for no women were in camp; so Lewis took out his flag and
+advanced unfalteringly.  An Indian came forward.  Lewis and the chief
+shook hands, but Lewis now had no presents to pacify hostiles.  Camping
+with the Minnetarees for the night, as if he feared nothing, Lewis
+nevertheless took good care to keep close watch on all movements.  He
+smoked the pipe of peace with them as late as he dared; and when he
+retired to sleep, he had ordered Fields and the other two white men to be
+on guard.  At sunrise the Indians crowded round the fire, where Fields
+had for the moment carelessly laid his rifle.  Simultaneously, the
+warriors dashed at the weapons of the sleeping white men, while other
+Indians made off with the explorers' horses.  With a shout, Fields gave
+the alarm, and pursuing the thieves, grappled with the Indian who had
+stolen his rifle.  In the scuffle the Indian was stabbed to the heart.
+Drewyer succeeded in wresting back his gun, and Lewis dashed out with his
+pistol, shouting for the Indians to leave the horses.  The raiders were
+mounting to go off at full speed.  The white men pursued on foot.  Twelve
+horses fell behind; but just as the Indians dashed for hiding behind a
+cliff, Lewis' strength gave out.  He warned them if they did not stop he
+would shoot.  An Indian turned to fire with one of the stolen weapons,
+and instantly Lewis' pistol rang true.  The fellow rolled to earth
+mortally wounded; but Lewis felt the whiz of a bullet past his own head.
+Having captured more horses than they had lost, the white men at once
+mounted and rode for their lives through river and slough, sixty miles
+without halt; for the Minnetarees would assuredly rally a larger band of
+warriors to their aid.  A pause of an hour to refresh the horses and a
+wilder ride by moonlight put forty more miles between Captain Lewis and
+danger.  At daylight the men were so sore from the mad pace for
+twenty-four hours that they could scarcely stand; but safety depended on
+speed and on they went again till they reached the main Missouri, where
+by singularly good luck some of the other _voyageurs_ had arrived.
+
+[Illustration: On Guard.]
+
+The entire forces were reunited below the Yellowstone on August 12th.
+Traders on the way up the Missouri from St. Louis brought first news of
+the outer world, and the discoverers were not a little amused to learn
+that they had been given up for dead.  At the Mandans, Colter, one of the
+frontiersmen, asked leave to go back to the wilds; and Chaboneau, with
+his dauntless wife, bade the white men farewell.  On September 20th
+settlers on the river bank above St. Louis were surprised to see thirty
+ragged men, with faces bronzed like leather, passing down the river.
+Then some one remembered who these worn _voyageurs_ were, and cheers of
+welcome made the cliffs of the Missouri ring.  On September 23d, at
+midday, the boats drew quietly up to the river front of St. Louis.  Lewis
+and Clark, the greatest pathfinders of the United States, had returned
+from the discovery of a new world as large as half Europe, without losing
+a single man but Sergeant Floyd, who had died from natural causes a few
+months after leaving St. Louis.  What Radisson had begun in 1659-1660,
+what De la V�rendrye had attempted when he found the way barred by the
+Rockies--was completed by Lewis and Clark in 1805.  It was the last act
+in that drama of heroes who carved empire out of wilderness; and all
+alike possessed the same hero-qualities--courage and endurance that were
+indomitable, the strength that is generated in life-and-death grapple
+with naked primordial reality, and that reckless daring which defies life
+and death.  Those were hero-days; and they produced hero-types, who flung
+themselves against the impossible--and conquered it.  What they conquered
+we have inherited.  It is the Great Northwest.
+
+[Illustration: Indians of the Up-country or _Pays d'en Haut_.]
+
+
+
+[1] Mention of this man is to be found in Northwest Company manuscripts,
+lately sold in the Masson collection of documents to the Canadian
+Archives and McGill College Library.  It was also my good fortune--while
+this book was going to print--to see the entire family collection of
+Clark's letters, owned by Mrs. Julia Clark Voorhis of New York.  Among
+these letters is one to Chaboneau from Clark.  In spite of the cordial
+relations between the Nor'westers and Lewis and Clark, these fur traders
+cannot conceal their fear that this trip presages the end of the fur
+trade.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+For the very excellent translations of the almost untranslatable
+transcripts taken from the Marine Archives of Paris, and forwarded to
+me by the Canadian Archives, I am indebted to Mr. R. Roy, of the Marine
+Department, Ottawa, the eminent authority on French Canadian
+genealogical matters.
+
+Some of the topics in the Appendices are of such a controversial
+nature--the whereabouts of the Mascoutins, for instance--that at my
+request Mr. Roy made the translation absolutely literal no matter how
+incongruous the wording.  To those who say Radisson was not on the
+Missouri I commend Appendix E, where the tribes of the West are
+described.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN TO M. COMPORT� BY M. CHOUART,
+  AT LONDON, THE 29TH APRIL, 1685
+
+SIR,
+
+I have received the two letters with which you have honored me; I have
+even received one inclosed that I have not given, for reasons that I
+will tell you, God willing, in a few days.
+
+I have received your instructions contained in the one and the other,
+as to the way I should act, and I should not have failed to execute all
+that you order me for the service of our Master, if I had been at full
+liberty so to do; you must have no doubt about it, because my
+inclination and my duty agree perfectly well.  All the advantages that
+I am offered did not for a moment cause me to waver, but, in short,
+sir, I could not go to Paris, and I shall be happy to go and meet you
+by the route you travel.  I shall be well pleased to find landed the
+people you state will be there; in case they may have the commission
+you speak of in your two letters, have it accompanied if you please
+with a memorandum of what I shall have to do for the service of our
+Master.  I know of a case whereby I am sufficiently taught that it is
+not safe to undertake too many things, however advantageous they may
+be, nor undertaking too little.  I am convinced, sir, that having
+orders, I will carry them out at the risk of my life, and I flatter
+myself that you do not doubt it.
+
+There is much likelihood that the men you sent last year are lost.
+
+I should like, sir, to be at the place you desire me to go; be assured
+I will perish, or be there as soon as I possibly can; it is saying
+enough.  I do not answer to the rest of your letter, it is sufficient
+that I am addressing a sensible man, who, knowing my heart, will not
+doubt that I will keep my word with him, as I believe he will do all he
+can for my interests.
+
+I am, with much anxiety to see you, sir, your most humble and most
+obedient servant,
+
+(signed) CHOUART.
+
+I will leave here only on the 25th of next month.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN BY M. CHOUART TO
+  MRS. DES GROSEILLERS, HIS MOTHER
+
+AT LONDON, 11TH APRIL, 1685.
+
+MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,
+
+I learn by the letter you have written me, of the 2nd November last,
+that my father has returned from France without obtaining anything at
+that Court, which made you think of leaving Quebec; my sentiment would
+be that you abandon this idea as I am strongly determined to go and be
+by you at the first opportunity I get, which shall be, God willing, as
+soon as I have taken means to that effect when I have returned from the
+North.
+
+I hope to start on this voyage in a month or six weeks at the latest; I
+cannot determine on what date I could be near you; my father may know
+what difficulties there are.  However, I hope to surmount them, and
+there is nothing I would not do to that end.
+
+The money I left with my cousin is intended to buy you a house, as I
+have had always in mind to do, had not my father opposed it, but now I
+will do it so as to give you a chance to get on, and always see you in
+the country where I will live.
+
+I have been made, here, proposals of marriage, to which I have not
+listened, not being here under the rule of my king nor near my parents,
+and I would have left this kingdom had I been given the liberty to do
+so, but they hold back on me my pay and the price of my merchandise,
+and I cannot sail away as orders have been given to arrest me in case I
+should prepare to leave.
+
+What you fear in reference to my money should not give you any
+uneasiness on account of the English.  I will cause it to be pretty
+well known that I never intended to follow the English.  I have been
+surprised and forced by my uncle's subterfuges to risk this voyage
+being unable to escape the English vessels where my uncle made me go
+without disclosing his plan, which he has worked out in bringing me
+here, but I will not disclose mine either: to abandon this nation.  I
+am willing that my cousin should pay you the income on my money, until
+I return home.  M. the earl of Denonville, your governor, will see to
+my mother's affairs, as they who render service to the country will not
+be forsaken as in the past, and being generous as he is, loyal and
+zealous for his country, he will inform the Court what there is to be
+done for the benefit of our nation.
+
+I am, my dear mother, to my father and to you,
+
+most obedient servant,
+  (signed) CHOUART.
+
+And below is written:--
+
+MOTHER,
+
+I pray you to see on my behalf M. du Lude, and assure him of my very
+humble services.  I will have the honor of seeing him as soon as I can.
+Please do the same with M. Peray and all our good friends.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+COUNCIL
+
+Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, 8th June, 1704.
+
+By the indians Kiskacous, Ottawa, Sinagot of the Sable Nation, Hurons,
+Saulteurs (Sault Indians), Amikoique (Amikou�s), Mississaugas,
+Nipissings, Miamis and Wolves, in the presence of M. de
+Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a
+detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at
+the said post; Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the
+Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as
+_voyageurs_.
+
+The one named FORTY SOLS, (40 half-penny), indian chief of the Huron
+nation speaks as much on behalf of the said nation as of all those
+present at the meeting.
+
+The French having come, he said:--
+
+"We ask that all the French be present at this Council so that they
+hear and know what we will say to you.
+
+"We are well on this land, it is very good, and we are much pleased
+with it; listen well, father, we pray you.
+
+"Mrs de Tonty went away last year; she did not return; we see you going
+away to-day, father, with your wife, your children and all the
+Frenchwomen as well as that of M. Radisson, who is going down with you;
+that reveals to us that you abandon us.
+
+"We are angry for good and ill-disposed if the women go away.  We pray
+you to pay attention to this because we could not stop you nor your
+young men: we demand that Radisson remains, or at least, that he
+returns promptly."
+
+
+BY A NECKLACE (Wampum)
+
+"We will escort your wife and the other Frenchwomen who intend to go
+down to Montreal.  Now, mind well what we are asking you.
+
+"We readily see that the Governor is a liar, as he does not keep to
+what he has promised us; as he has lied to us we will lie to him also,
+and we will listen no more to his word.
+
+"What brings that man here (speaking of M. Desnoyers)?  We do not know
+him and do not understand him; we are ill-disposed.  It is two years
+since you have been gathering in our peltries, part of which has been
+taken down; we will allow nothing to leave until the French come up
+with goods."
+
+
+BY ANOTHER NECKLACE
+
+"Father, we pray you to send back that man (speaking of M. Desnoyers),
+because if he remains here, we do not answer for his safety; our people
+have told us that he despises our peltries and only wanted beaver;
+where does he want us to get it.  We absolutely want him to go; nothing
+will leave the house where the trading is done and where the peltries
+and bundles are, until the French arrive here with merchandise and they
+be allowed to trade.  When we came here, the Governor did not tell us
+that the merchants would be masters over the merchandise; he lied to
+us; we ask that all the Frenchmen trade here; we pray you to write and
+tell him what we are saying, and if he does not listen to us, we will
+also refuse to accept his word.
+
+"The land is not yours, it is ours, and we will leave it to go where we
+like without anybody finding fault.  We regret having allowed the
+surgeon to leave as we apprehend he will not come back.
+
+"We pray you will cause to remain Gauvereau the blacksmith and gunsmith.
+
+"I have nothing more to say, I have spoken for all the nations here
+present."
+
+M. de Lamothe had a question put to the Ottawa and the other nations,
+if that was their sentiment; they all answered: Yes, and that they were
+of one and the same mind.  He told them that, seeing they had taken
+time to think over what they had just said, he would consider as to
+what he had to answer them, and, put them off to the morrow, after
+having accepted their necklace.
+
+(Not signed.)
+
+
+COUNCIL
+
+Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, the 9th June, 1704.
+
+By the Indians Kiskacous; Ottawas; Sinagotres, the Sable nation;
+Hurons; Sauteux (Sault Ste Marie Indians); Amikoique (Beaver nation);
+Mississaugas; Miamis and Wolves in the presence of M. de
+Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a
+detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at
+the said post, Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the
+Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as
+_voyageurs_.
+
+M. de Lamothe addressed all the said nations:--
+
+"As you requested me to pay attention to your words, please listen, the
+same, to-day.
+
+"I was aware that Mdme. de Tonty's trip to Montreal last year had given
+you umbrage, because she did not come back; and the cause of it is her
+pregnancy.
+
+"I knew also that my wife's setting out for Montreal as also the other
+Frenchwomen was causing you uneasiness, because you believed I was
+going to abandon you.  It is true she was going away, but it was not
+for ever.  I showed her your necklace; that her children would miss her
+very much and that they begged of her to stay.  When she heard of your
+grief, she accepted your necklace and she will stay for some time,
+because she does not like to refuse her children; the other Frenchwomen
+will remain also.
+
+"You spoke ill of the Governor when you said he was a liar.  If anyone
+told you that he was forsaking you, I will be pleased if you will tell
+me who it is.  As for me I have no knowledge of it.
+
+"M. Desnoyers was present when you offered your necklace, and like me
+he heard your statement.  He told me you were wrong to complain about
+him because he would not take your peltries and that he wanted beaver
+only; you are complaining inopportunely seeing that he has not done any
+trading.  You should tell me who made those reports.  But as you are
+not glad to see him, he has decided to go back, and as I am going down
+to Montreal on good business, he will accompany me, and also M.
+Radisson, because the Governor wants him, and he must obey, and we will
+arrange so that we come back together.
+
+"You have asked me to write down your speech to the Governor.  I will
+be the bearer of it.  I have not the authority to have the French to
+trade here; it is a matter that M. the Governor will settle with M. the
+Intendant.
+
+"The Governor did not lie to you because he did not notify you the
+first year, that the merchants would be masters of the merchandise,
+because it was the King who sent it here then and I could dispose of
+it; since then, an order came from the King in favor of the merchants.
+
+"This land is mine, because I am the first one who lighted a fire
+thereon, and you all took some to light yours.
+
+"I am very glad that you like this land, and that you find it is good.
+
+"It is of no consequence that the surgeon left, because when one goes
+another comes, and the same applies for the gunsmith.
+
+"I have no more to tell you.  Here is some tobacco that you may all
+smoke together, and that it may give you wisdom until I return and the
+Governor sends you his word.  Attend to your mother during my absence,
+and see that she does not want for provisions, for if you do not take
+care of her, on my return I will not give you a drink of brandy.
+
+"M. de Tonty replaces me; I pray you to be on good terms with him."
+
+FORTY SOLS, chief of the Hurons, spoke for all the indians:--
+
+"We remember well, father, of what we said yesterday because you repeat
+it to-day.  We thank you for having listened to us and granted all we
+asked you.  We thank the women for not going away, because their
+remaining is as if you remained.  From to-morrow we will stimulate our
+young men to go after provisions for our mother.
+
+"It is three years ago, when in Montreal at the general meeting our
+chiefs died, the governor told us to have courage, that he was sorry
+for us, that he saw we were very far to come and get goods in Montreal,
+and he invited us to come and settle around you, and that he would send
+us merchandise at the same price as in Montreal.  This worked well for
+two years, but goods rose up too much in price the third year.
+
+"The first year you came, we were very happy, but now we are naked, not
+even having a bad shirt to put on our back.  We would be pleased by the
+establishment of several stores here, because if we were refused in
+one, we could go to another.
+
+"We are very glad of M. Desnoyers' going back because we do not know
+him and we fear some of our young men may be ill-disposed.
+
+"We were under the impression the Governor had sold us to the merchants
+since they are the masters of the commerce.
+
+"It is true that we took of your fire to light ours but we have waited
+two years without anything coming this way so that your land is ours.
+I told the same thing to the Governor last year in Montreal.
+
+"Have courage, father, we will pray God for you during your voyage so
+that you may bring back good news."
+
+(Not signed.)
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+Cie des Indes
+
+(Indies Co'y)
+
+Renders account to the said company of the death of Mr. Radisson,
+receiver at Montreal, of the nomination ad interim of Mr. Gamelin to
+fill the vacancy of receiver, of account to render by Mr. Deplessis,
+heir of Mr. Radisson to re�stablish price of summer beaver as before
+ordinance of the 4th January, 1733.
+
+AT QUEBEC, THE 25TH OCTOBER, 1735.
+
+GENTLEMEN,
+
+I have received the letter you did me the honor to send me of the 9th
+March last.
+
+M. Radisson, your receiver at Montreal, died there the 14th of June and
+immediately M. Gamelin, merchant, to whom Messrs La Gorgendi�re and
+Daine had given three years ago, had commissioned to look after your
+interests in default or in case of death of M. Radisson, applied to M.
+Michel, my sub-delegate to affix the seals on of all your effects,
+which was done according to the account rendered you by Messrs. La
+Gorgendi�re and Daine.
+
+It was necessary to fill the vacancy.  I have appointed temporarily in
+virtue of the authority, you gave, gentlemen, the same M. Gamelin; I
+thought I could not have your interests in better hands, as much for
+his honesty than his intelligence in regulating his sales and his
+receipts.  Independently of the knowledge he has of the different
+qualities of beaver, I have had the honor to speak to you on this
+subject in my preceding letters and to say that the only obstacle I
+find to giving him the office of receiver at Montreal was his quality
+of merchant outfitter for the upper country, which might render him
+suspicious to you because of the returns he gets in beaver.  Although I
+have a pretty good opinion of him to believe his loyalty proof against
+any particular interest, you shall see, gentlemen, by the copy of the
+commission I have given him, which is sent you, that it is on condition
+either directly or indirectly to do no traffic in the upper country,
+and to confine himself either to marine trade or other inland commerce,
+to which he has agreed, but nevertheless has represented to me that
+being engaged as a partner with M. Lamarque, another merchant, for the
+working out of the post named "the Western Sea" and that of the Sioux;
+this partnership only terminating in 1737; that he was looking around
+to sell his share, but, if this thing was impossible requesting me to
+kindly allow him to continue until that term, past which he would cease
+all commerce in the upper country.  I agreed to this arrangement on
+account of his good qualities, and this will not turn to any account of
+consequence; whatever, selection you may make, gentlemen, you will not
+find a better one in this country.
+
+M. de La Gorgendi�re having offered me his son to act as clerk to M.
+Gamelin and comptroller in the Montreal office, for the auditing to be
+made, without increasing on that score the expenditure of your
+administration, I have consented on these conditions; M. Gamelin to
+give him 800 livres (shillings) on the commission of one per cent the
+company allow the receiver at Montreal, and M. Daine has assured me he
+was satisfied with his work.
+
+I will not entertain, you, messieurs, with the discussion of the
+account to be rendered by M. Duplessis, M. Radisson's heir, to your
+agent, who claims he owes 5 to 6000 livres.  Those discussions did not
+take place in my presence.
+
+Most of the beaver shipped this year were put up in bundles, and
+shortage in cotton cloth for packing prevented shipment of the whole.
+
+The disturbances which have occurred for some years in the upper
+country have effectively prevented the Indians from hunting; the post
+of the Bay which abounds ordinarily with beaver, produced nothing;
+those of Detroit and Michilimakinac, only furnished very little.
+Happily the post of the Sioux and of the Western Sea produced near to
+100,000 which swelled up the receipt; otherwise it would have been very
+middling.
+
+The party commanded by M. Desnoyelles against the Indians Sakis and
+Foxes was not as successful as expected on account of the desertion and
+retreat of 100 Hurons and Iroquois who left him when at the Kakanons
+(Kiskanons of Michilimakinac?) without his being able to hold them, so
+that this officer found himself after a long tramp at those Indians'
+fort, not only inferior in numbers but also much in want of provisions.
+He was under the necessity of returning after a rather sharp skirmish
+which took place between some of his men and the enemy.  We lost two
+Frenchmen and one of our indians; the Foxes and Sakis lost 21 men,
+either killed, wounded or captured.
+
+If the Sakis come back to the Bay, as they pledged themselves to M.
+Desnoyelles we are in hopes here that peace will again flourish and
+consequently the trade of the upper country.
+
+I have seen, gentlemen, what you were pleased to say as to reduction in
+price on the summer-beaver.  I had been assured by reliable persons
+that this reduction might become very injurious to your commerce.  I
+have learned that some of this kind of beaver were carried to the
+English who pay two livres (shillings) for one and at a higher price
+than you pay over your counters.  It was from what you wrote me in
+1732, that the hatters could make no use of that beaver, that at your
+request I published an ordinance of the 4th January, 1733, reducing the
+price of summer-beaver either green (gras) or dry (sec) to ten pence a
+pound, on condition that it should be burned.  There could be nothing
+suspicious in that.  But since you now deem that that reduction may be
+harmful, as I have also had in mind to invite the indians and even the
+French under this pretence to take the good as well as the bad beaver
+to the English; I will restore the price of the summer-beaver as it was
+before my ordinance.  I will not be at a loss for a cause: it is not in
+your interest to give a lower price.  You run your commerce, gentlemen,
+with too much good faith to give rise to suspicion that you wished for
+a reduction in price to 10 pence for this kind of beaver, and having it
+burned only to procure it yourself at that price and not burn it.
+Besides, the quantity received is too small a matter to deserve
+consideration.
+
+[Sidenote: Beaver hats half worked made in the country.]
+
+M. the marquis de Beauharnois and I have received the orders of the
+King with reference to beaver hats half worked made in Canada.  His
+Majesty has ordered us to break up the workmen's benches and to prevent
+any manufacture of hats.  We have made some representations on this
+subject, to those made to us, namely by a man named ------, hatter, and
+your receiver at Quebec.  It is true that the making of beaver hats
+half worked and other for export to France could turn out of
+consequence in ruining your privilege and the hat establishments in
+France.  These are the only inconveniences, to my mind, to be feared,
+as I do not look upon such, the making of hats for the use of residents
+of the country.  So that we have satisfied ourselves, until further
+orders, to forbid the going, out of the colony, of all kind of hats, as
+you will see by the ordinance we have published together, M. the
+General and I.  If we had been more strict, the three hatters
+established in this colony, who know no other business than their
+trade, the man ------ amongst others, who follow that calling from
+father to son, would have been reduced to begging.
+
+The quantity of hats they will manufacture when export is stopped,
+cannot be of any injury to the manufactures of the kingdom and be but
+of small matter to your commerce.  Moreover, I am aware that these
+hatters employ the worst kind of beaver, which they get very cheap, and
+your stores at Paris are that much rid of them.
+
+[Sidenote: Defects in list of cloth sent.]
+
+The cloths you sent this year are of better quality than the precedding
+shipment.  Messrs La Gorgendiere, Daine and Gamelin have observed on
+defects which happen in the lists; they told me they would inform you.
+
+[Sidenote: Remittance of 300 livres (shillings) to the Baron de
+Longueuil.]
+
+I have the honor to thank you, gentlemen, for the remittance of 300
+livres you were pleased to grant to M. the Baron of Longueuil, on my
+recommendation.
+
+It is very difficult to prevent the Indians going to Chouaguen; the
+brandy that the English give out freely is an invincible attraction.
+
+I have heard, the same as you, that some Frenchmen disguised as Indians
+had been there; if I can discover some one, you may be sure that I will
+deal promptly with them.  You may have heard that the man LENOIR,
+resident of Montreal, having gone to England three years ago without
+leave, I have kept him in prison till he had settled the fine he was
+condemned to pay, and which I transferred to the hospitals.  I add that
+a part of the interest you have in the Indians not going to Chouaguen,
+I have another on account of the trading carried on for the benefit of
+the King at Niagara and at fort Frontenac which that English post has
+ruined.  By all means you may rely on my attention to break up English
+trade.  I fear I may not succeed in this so long as the brandy traffic,
+although moderate, will find adversaries among those who govern
+consciences.
+
+[Sidenote: Foreign trade; Beaver at trade at Labrador.]
+
+I will do my best to prevent the beaver which is traded at Labrador and
+the other posts in the lower part of the River to be smuggled to France
+by ships from Bayonne, St Malo and Marseille.  This will be difficult
+as we cannot have at those posts any inspector.  I will try, however,
+to give an ordinance so as to prevent that, which may intimidate some
+of those who carry on that commerce.
+
+It is true that the commandants of the upper country posts have relaxed
+in the sending of the declarations made or to be made by the
+_voyageurs_ as to the quantity and quality of the bundles of beaver
+they take down to Montreal.  M. the General and I have renewed the
+necessary orders on this subject so that the commandants shall conform
+to them.
+
+[Sidenote: Asks for continuation of gratuity received by Mr. Michel,
+even to increase it.]
+
+M. Michel, my subdelegate at Montreal has received the bounty of 500
+livres you have requested your agent to pay to him; he hopes that you
+will be pleased to have it continued next year.  I have the honor to
+pray you to do so, and even augment it, if possible.  I can assure you,
+gentlemen that he lends himself on all occasions to all that may
+concern your commerce.  As for myself, I am very flattered by the
+opinion you entertain that I have at heart your interests.  I always
+feel a true satisfaction in renewing you these assurances.
+
+I am, respectfully,
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Thanks for the coffee sent.]
+
+GENTLEMEN, M. de La Gorgendi�re has delivered to me on your behalf, a
+bale of Moka coffee.  I am very sensible, gentlemen, to this token of
+friendship on your part.
+
+I have the honor to thank you, and to assure you that I am very truly
+and respectfully, etc.
+
+(signed) HOCQUART.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX E
+
+MEMORANDUM RE CANADA
+
+(No locality) 1697
+
+All the discoveries in America were only made step by step and little
+by little, especially those of lands held by the French in that part of
+the North.
+
+It being certain that during the reign of king Francis I, several of
+his subjects, amateurs of shipping and of discoveries, in imitation of
+the Portuguese and the Spaniards, made the voyage, where they found the
+great cod bank.  The quality of birds frequenting this sea where they
+always find food, caused them to heave the lead, and bottom was found
+and the said great bank.
+
+He got an opinion on the nearest lands, and other curious persons
+desired to go farther, and discovered Cape Breton, Virginia and
+Florida.  Some even inhabited and took possession of the divers places,
+abandoned since, through misunderstanding of the commanders and their
+poor skill in knowing how to keep on good terms with the indians of
+those countries, who, good natured all at the beginning, could not
+suffer the rigor with which it was wanted to subjugate them, so that
+after a short occupation, they left to return to Europe.  And since,
+the Spaniards and the English successfully have taken possession of the
+land and all the coasts that the said English have kept until this day
+to much advantage, so that Frenchmen who have returned since have been
+obliged to settle at Cape Breton and Acadia.
+
+About the year 1540, the said Cape Breton was fortified by Jacques
+Carrier, captain of St Malo, who afterward entered the river St.
+Lawrence up to 7 or 8 leagues above Quebec, where desiring to know
+more, the season also being too far advanced he stopped off to winter
+at a small river which bears his name and which forms the boundary of
+M. de Becancourt's land whom he knew; he made sociable a number of
+Indians who came aboard his ship and brought back beaver pretty
+abundantly.
+
+Since, he made another voyage with Saintonge men which did not prevent
+several other ships to go after the said beaver; men from Dieppe,
+Brittany and La Rochelle, some with a passport and others by fraud and
+piracy, especially the latter, the Civil war having carried away
+persons out of dutifulness, the Admiralty and the Marine being then
+held in very little consideration, which lasted a long time.
+
+However, I believe for having heard it said, that the lands after new
+discoveries were given since to M. Chabot or to M. Ventadour, where a
+certain gentleman from Saintonge named M. du Champlain, had very free
+admittance and who may have mingled with those of his country who had
+navigated with Carrier and had given him a longing to see that of which
+he had only heard speak.
+
+He was a proper man for such a scheme; a great courage, wisdom,
+sensible, pious, fair and of great experience; a robust body which
+would render him indefatigable and capable to resist hunger, cold and
+heat.
+
+This gentleman then solicited permission to come to Canada and obtained
+it.  His small estate and his friends supplied him with a medium sized
+vessel for the passage.  This new commandant or governor pitied much
+the Indians and had the satisfaction at his arrival to see that he was
+much feared and loved by them.  He took memoranda through his
+interpreter of their wars, their mode of living and of their interests.
+At that time they were numerous and proud of the great advantages they
+had over the Iroquois, their enemy.  With this information he recrossed
+to France; gave an account of his voyage, and was so charmed with the
+land, the climate and of the good which would result from a permanent
+establishment that he persuaded his wife to accompany him.  His example
+induced missionaries of St. Fran�ois and some parisian families to
+follow him.  He was granted a commission or governor's provisions to
+take his living from the country.
+
+He erected a palissade fort at the place now occupied by the fort St
+Louis of Quebec.
+
+To please the indians he went with them and three Frenchmen only,
+warring in the Iroquois country, which has no doubt given rise to our
+quarrel with this nation.
+
+The Commerce was then in the hands of the Rochelois (?) who supplied
+some provisions to the said M. de Champlain, a man without interest and
+disposed to be content with little.
+
+He returns to France in the interests of the country and took back
+Madam his wife who died in a Ursuline convent, at Saintes, I believe,
+and he at Quebec, after having worked hard there, with little help
+because of the misfortunes of France.
+
+M. the Cardinal of Richelieu have inspired France with confidence by
+the humiliation of the Rochelois (?) wanted to take care of the marine
+and formed at that time, about 1626 or 1627 what was then called the
+"Society of One Hundred," in which joined persons of all
+qualifications, and also merchants from Dieppe and Rouen.  Dieppe was
+then reputed for good navigators and for navigation.
+
+The said M. the Cardinal got granted to the said company the islands of
+St Christophe, newly discovered and all the lands of Canada.  The
+Company composed of divers states did not take long to disjoin, and of
+this great Company several were formed by themselves, the ones
+concerning themselves about the Isles and the others about Canada,
+where they were also divided up in a Company of Miscou, which is an
+island of the Bay in the lower part of the River, where all the Indians
+meet, and a Company of Tadoussac or Quebec.
+
+The Basques, Rochelois, Bretons, and Normans, who during the disorders
+of the war had commenced secretly on the River, crossed their commerce
+much by the continuation of their runs without passport.  Sometimes on
+pretext of cod or whale fishing, notwithstanding the interdiction of
+decrees, the gain made them risk everything, as the two sides of the
+river were all settled and many more came down from inland.
+
+Those Companies for being badly served on account of inexperience and
+through poor economy, as will happen at the beginning of all affairs,
+were put to large expenses.
+
+The English had already seized on Boston abandoned by the French after
+their new discovery; beaver and elk peltry were much sought after and
+at a very high price in Europe; they could be had for a needle, a
+hawk-bell or a tin looking-glass, a marked copper coin.  Our possession
+was there very well-off.  The English who made war to us in France,
+also made it in Canada, and began to take the fleet about Isle Perc�e,
+as it was ascending to Quebec.
+
+As four or five vessels came every year loaded with goods for the
+Indians, it was at that time quantity of peas, plums, raisins, figs and
+others and provisions for M. de Champlain; a garrison of 15 or 20 men;
+a store in the lower town where the clerks of the Company lived with 10
+or 12 families already used to the country.  This succor failing, much
+hardship was endured in a country which then produced nothing by
+itself, so that the English presenting themselves the next year with
+their fleet, surrender was obligatory; the governor and the Recollets
+crossed over to France and the families were treated honestly enough.
+
+Happily in 1628 or 1629, France made it up with England and the treaty
+gave back Canada to the French, when M. de Champlain, returned and died
+some years later.
+
+Those of the Company of 100, who were persons of dignity and
+consideration, living in Paris, thought fit to leave the care and
+benefits of commerce for Canada with the Rouen and Dieppe merchants,
+with whom joined a few from Paris.  They were charged with the payment
+of the governor's appointments, to furnish him with provisions and
+subsistence and to keep up the garrisons of Quebec and Three-Rivers
+where there was also a post on account of the large number of Indians
+calling; to furnish the things necessary for the war; to pay themselves
+off the product and give account of the surplus to the directors of the
+Company who had an office at Paris.
+
+It has been said that Dieppe and Rouen benefitted and that Paris
+suffered and was disgusted.
+
+To M. de Champlain succeeded M. de Montmagny, very wise and very
+dignified; knight of Malta; relative of M. de Poinsy, who commanded at
+the Island of St Christophe where the said M. de Montmagny died after
+leaving Canada after a sojourn of 14 or 15 years, loved and cherished
+by the French and the natives--we say the French, although the
+complaints made against him by the principals were the cause of his
+sorrow and he resigned voluntarily.
+
+It is to be remarked that all the commerce was done at Rouen to go out
+through Dieppe on the hearsay and the fine connections that the Jesuit
+Fathers who had taken the Recollets' place, took great care to have
+printed and distributed every year.
+
+Canada was in vogue and several families from Normandy and the Perche
+took sail to come and reside in it; there were nobles, the most of them
+poor, we might say, who found out from the first, that M. de Montmagny
+was too disinterested to be willing to consider the change they desired
+for their advantage.  They intrigued against him five or six families
+without the participation of the others, got leave from him to go to
+France to ask for favors and there had one of themselves as governor;
+obtained liberty in the beaver trade, which until then had been
+strictly forbidden to the inhabitants who had been reserved the fruits
+of the country to advance the culture of the land such as pease, Indian
+corn, and wheat bread.  That was the first title of the inhabitants to
+trade with the indians.
+
+To arrive at that end they promised to pay annually 1000 beaver to the
+Paris office for its seignorial right which it did not receive through
+its attention and management of its affairs.
+
+They got permission to form a Board from their principal men, to
+transact with the governor all matters in the country for peace, for
+war, the settlement of accounts of their society or little republic,
+and also sitting on cases concerning interests of private individuals.
+
+It was then that to keep up this sham republic or society, a tax of
+one-fourth was imposed on the export of beaver.
+
+By these means the authority of the Company and its store were ruined
+and the whole was turning to the advantage of those four or six
+families, the others, either poor or slighted by the authority of M.
+D'Ailleboust, their governor.
+
+On this footing it was not hard for them to find large credit at La
+Rochelle, because loans were made in the name of the Community,
+although it consisted only of these four or six families; which from
+their being poor found themselves in large managements enlarged their
+household, ran into expense, that of their vessels and shipments was
+excessive and the wealth derived from the beaver was to pay all.
+
+Their bad management altered their credit and brought them to agree,
+after several years' enjoyment so as not to pay La Rochelle, to take
+their ships to H�vre-de-Grace, where, on arrival they sold to Messrs
+Lick and Tabac; this perfidy which they excused because of the large
+interest taken from them, alarmed La Rochelle who complained to Paris,
+and after much pressing a trustee was appointed to give bonds in the
+name of the society for large sums yet due to the city of La Rochelle.
+
+Their vessels all bore off to Normandy; they took on their cargoes
+there in part, and part at La Rochelle, the trade having been allowed
+those two places, because Rouen and Dieppe had several persons on the
+roll of the Company and obligation was due La Rochelle for having
+loaned property.
+
+The governor and the families addressed reproaches to each other, and
+the King being pleased to listen to them, had the kindness to appoint
+from the body of the company persons of first dignity to give attention
+to what was going on in this colony, who were called Commissioners;
+they were Messrs de Morangis, de la Marguerid, Verthamont and Chame,
+and since, Messrs de Lamoignon, de Boucherat and de Lauzon, the latter
+also of the body of the Company offered to pass over to this country to
+arrange the difficulties, and he asked for its government, which was
+accorded him.
+
+He embarked at La Rochelle because of the obligation of the creditors
+of that city to treat him gently; Rouen did not care much.  He was a
+literary man; he made friends with the R. F. Jesuits, and created a new
+council in virtue of the powers he had brought, rebuke the one and the
+other place, even the inhabitants, in forbidding them to barter in what
+was called the limits of Tadoussac, which he bounded for a particular
+lease as a security for his payment and of what has always since been
+called the offices of the country or the state of the 33,000 livres;
+the emoluments of the Councillors, the garrison, the Jesuits, the
+Parish, the Ursulines, the Hote-Dieu, etc.
+
+The pretext given was that the Iroquois having burned and ruined the
+Hurons or Ottawa, the tax of one-fourth did not produce enough to meet
+those demands, and because Tadoussac also was not sufficient to meet
+all the expenditure contemplated to give war to the Iroquois, he it was
+also who began in not paying the thousand weight in beaver owing for
+seignorial right to the Company who was irritated and blamed his
+conduct, and after the lapse of some years his friends write him they
+could not longer shield him he anticipated his recall in returning to
+France, where he has since served as sub-dean of the Council, residing
+at the cloister of Notre-Dame with his son, canon at the said church.
+
+I only saw him two years in Canada where he was hardly liked, by reason
+of the little care he took to keep up his rank, without servant, living
+on pork and peas like an artisan or a peasant.
+
+However, having decided to go back, for a second time he threw open the
+Tadoussac trade, by an order of his Council.
+
+M. de Lamoignon, the first president, got named to replace him, M.
+D'Argenson, young man of 30 to 32 years steady as could be, who
+remained four or five years to the satisfaction of everybody; he kept
+up the Council as it is intended for the security of his emoluments and
+of the garrison, selected twelve of the most notable persons to whom he
+gave the faculty of trading at Tadoussac and all the sureties to be
+wished for the administration and maintenance.
+
+He had the misfortune to fall out with the Jesuit Fathers, and they,
+with messieurs de Mont Royal, of St Sulpice who had sent Mr the abbey
+de Queysac, in the hope of making a bishop of him; the former wishing
+to have one of their nomination presented to the Queen-mother of the
+reigning King, whom God preserve, M. de Laval, to-day elder and first
+bishop, who, very rigid, not only backed the Jesuits against the
+governor in all difficulties but specially in the matter of the liquor
+traffic with the indians.  Although (D'Argenson) a much God-fearing-man
+he had his private opinions, and this offended him; he asked M. de
+Lamoignon for his recall, which was done in 1661, when M. d'Avaugour
+came out.
+
+It was in 1660 that the Office in Paris, at the request of the
+governor, of the Local council and on the advice of Messrs de
+Lamoignon, Chame and other commissioners made an agreement with the
+Rouen merchants to supply the inhabitants with all goods they would
+require with 60% profit on dry goods and 100% on liquors, freight paid.
+
+It was pretended that the country was not safely secured by ships of
+private parties, and that when they arrived alone by unforeseen
+accidents, they happened unexpectedly, to the ruin of the country; as
+well as the beaver fallen to a low price and which was restored only at
+the marriage of the king should keep up.
+
+The creditors then pressing payment of their claims, a decree ordered
+that of the 60%, 10% should be taken for the payment of debts which
+were fixed at 10,000 livres at the rate of the consumption of the time
+and of which the Company of Normandy took charge.  The country was
+favorable enough to this treaty because they were well served, but when
+the treaty arrived at first, the bishop who was jealous because he had
+not been consulted and that some little gratification had been given to
+facilitate matters had it opposed by some of the inhabitants and by M.
+D'Avaugour, governor in the place of the said D'Argenson.
+
+The Society of Normandy consented to the breaking off of the treaty on
+receiving a minute account and being paid some compensation, as to
+which they had no satisfaction because of the changes, for M.
+D'Avaugour, like the others, fell out with the Bishop who went to
+France and had him revoked, presenting in his stead M. de Mezy, a
+Norman gentleman who did nothing better than to overdo all the
+difficulties arising on the question of the Bishop and the Governor's
+powers.
+
+The beaver dropped down, as soon, to a low price, and there was a
+difference by half when the King in 1664 formed the Company of the West
+Indies, which alone, to the exclusion of all others, had to supply the
+country with merchandise and receive also all the beaver; in 1669, came
+M. de Tracy, de Courcelles and Talon; the latter did not want any
+Company and employed all kinds of ways to ruin the one he found
+established.  He gave to understand to M. Colbert that this country was
+too big to be bounded; that there should come out of it fleets and
+armies; his plans appeared too broad, still he met with no
+contradiction at first, on the contrary he was lauded, which moved him
+to establish a large trade and put out that of the company, which
+through bad success in its affairs at the Isles, was relaxing enough of
+itself in all sorts of undertakings.
+
+M. Talon desiring to bring together the government and the
+superintendence was spending on a large scale to make friends and
+therefore there was not a merchant when the Company quit who could
+transact any business in his presence; he gets his goods free of dues,
+freight and insurance; he also refused to pay the import tax on his
+wines, liquors and tobacco.
+
+Finally his friends or enemies told him aloud that it was of profits of
+his commerce that the King would be enriched.
+
+They fell out, M. de Courcelles and he; their misunderstanding forced
+the first to ask for his discharge.  M. de Frontenac, who succeeded him
+also complained and I believe he returned to France without his cong�
+whence he never came back although he had promised so to all his
+friends.
+
+You are aware as well as and perhaps better than I of the disputes of
+M. de Frontenac and M. du Chesneau.
+
+And that is all I have been told for my satisfaction of what occurred
+previous to 1655 when I came here to attend to the affairs of the Rouen
+Company.
+
+I have also learned at the time of my arrival that properly speaking,
+though there were a very large number of Indians, known under divers
+names, which they bear with reference to certain action that their
+chiefs had performed or with reference to lakes, rivers, lands or
+mountains which they inhabit, or sometimes to animals stocking their
+rivers and forests, nevertheless they could all be comprised under two
+mother languages, to wit: the Huron and the Algonquin.
+
+At that period, I was told, the Huron was the most spread over men and
+territory, and at present, I believe, that the Algonquin can well be
+compared to it.
+
+To note, that all the Indians of the Algonquin language are stationed
+and occupy land that we call land of the North on account of the River
+which divides the country into two parts, and where they all live by
+fishing and hunting.
+
+As well as the Indians of the Huron language who inhabit land to the
+South, where they till the land and winter wheat, horse-beans, pease,
+and other similar seeds to subsist; they are sedentary and the
+Algonquin follow fish and game.
+
+However, this nation has always passed for the noblest, proudest and
+hardest to manage when prosperous.  When the French came here the true
+Algonquin owned land from Tadoussac to Quebec, and I have always
+thought they were issued from the Saguenay.  It was a tradition that
+they had expelled the Iroquois from the said place of Quebec and
+neighborhood where they once lived; we were shown the sites of their
+villages and towns covered by trees of a fresh growth, and now that the
+lands are of value through cultivation, the farmers find thereon tools,
+axes and knives as they were used to make them.
+
+We must believe that the said Algonquin were really masters over the
+said Iroquois, because they obliged them to move away so far.
+
+Nobody could tell me anything certain about the origin of their war but
+it was of a more cruel nature between these two nations than between
+the said Iroquois and Hurons, who have the same language or nearly so.
+
+It is only known that the Iroquois commenced first to burn, importuned
+by their enemies who came to break their heads whilst at work in their
+wilderness; they imagined that such cruel treatment would give them
+relaxation, and since, all the nations of this continent have used
+fire, with the exception of the Abenakis and other tribes of Virginia.
+
+These Iroquois having had the best of the fight and reduced the
+Algonquins since our discovery of this country, principally because
+their pride giving us apprehension about their large number, they would
+not arm themselves until a long time after the Dutch had armed the
+Iroquois, made war and ruined all the other nations who were not nearly
+so warlike as the Algonquin, and after the war, diseases came on that
+killed those remaining; some have scattered in the woods, but in
+comparison to what I have seen on my arrival, one might say that there
+are no more men in this country outside of the fastnesses of the
+forests recently discovered.
+
+The Hurons before their defeat by the Iroquois had, through the hope of
+their conversion obliged the Jesuits to establish with them a strong
+mission, and as from time to time it was necessary to carry to them
+necessities of life, the governors began to allow some of their
+servants to run up there every three or four years, from where they
+brought that good green (gras) Huron beaver that the hatters seek for
+so much.
+
+Sometimes this was kept up; sometimes no one offered for the voyage
+there being then so little greediness it is true that the Iroquois were
+so feared; M. de Lauson was the only one to send two individuals in
+1656 who each secured 14 to 15,000 livres and came back with an indian
+fleet worth 100,000 crowns.  However, M. D'Argenson who succeeded him
+and was five years in the country sent nobody neither did Messrs
+Avaugour and de Mezy.
+
+It was consequently after the arrival of M. Talon that under pretext of
+discovery, and of finding copper mines, he alone became director of
+those voyages, for he obliged M. de Courcelles to sign him cong�s which
+he got worked, but on a dispute between the workers he handled some
+himself, of which I remember.
+
+You know the number and the regulations given under the first
+administration of M. the Earl of Frontenac.
+
+It is certain that it is the holders of cong�s who look after and bring
+down the beaver, and, can it be said that it is wrong to have an
+abundance of goods.
+
+The French and the Indians have come down this year; the receipts of
+the office must total up 200 millions or thereabouts, which judging
+from your letter, will surprise those gentlemen very much.  The clerks
+have rejected it as much as they liked; I am told that they admitted
+somewhere about six thousands of muscovy; during our administration
+there were 28 or 30 thousands received, which is a large difference
+without taking into account other qualities, and all this does not give
+the French much trouble, and at the most for the year we were not
+informed.  I have given my sentiments to the meeting, and in particular
+to M. de Frontenac and to M. de Champigny.
+
+We should be agreeable to our Prince's wishes who is doing so much good
+to this country: his tenants who must supply him in such troubled
+times, lose, and it is proper that people in Canada contribute
+something to compensate them by freely agreeing to a pretty rich
+receipt on their commodity but what resource in regard to the indian so
+interested that everything moves with him, through necessity; they are
+asked and sought after to receive English goods, infinitely better than
+ours, at a cost half as low and to pay their beaver very high.
+
+This commercial communication gives them peace with their enemies and
+liberty to hunt, and consequently to live in abundance instead of their
+living at present with great hardship.  Should we not say that it
+requires a great affection not to break away in the face of such strong
+attractions; if we lose them once we lose them for ever, that it is
+certain, and from friends they become our enemies; thus we lose not
+only the beaver but the colony, and absolutely no more cattle, no more
+grains, no more fishing.
+
+The colony with all the forces of the Kingdom cannot resist the Indians
+when they have the English or other Europeans to supply them with
+ammunitions of war, which leads me to the query: what is the beaver
+worth to the English that they seek to get it by all means?
+
+If also the rumors set agoing are true the farmers-general would not
+sell a considerable part to the Danes at a very high price, should they
+not have had somebody in their employ who understands and knows that
+article well, it appears to me that the thing is worth while.
+
+All the same, people are asking why they want to sell so dear, what
+costs them so little, for taking one and the other, that going out this
+year should not cost them more than 50s (_sous_), the entries,
+Tadoussac, and the tax of one fourth, does it not pay the lease with
+profit.  This is in everybody's mind, and everyone looks at it as he
+fancies.
+
+I was of opinion to arrange the receipts on a basis that these
+gentlemen got M. Benac to offer, so as to avoid the difficulties on the
+qualities, and this opinion served to examine the loss this proposition
+would bring to the country in the general receipt.
+
+I have no other interest than the Prince's service, and to please these
+gentlemen I should like to know, heartily, of some expedient, because
+it is absolutely necessary to find one to satisfy the Indian; M. the
+Earl of Frontenac is under a delusion: I may say it, they will give us
+the goby, and after that all shall be lost, I am not sure even, if they
+would not repeat the Sicilian Vespers, to show their good will, and
+that they never want to make it up.  I am so isolated that I do not say
+anything about it, as I am afraid for myself, but I know well that it
+is Indian's nature to betray, and that our affairs are not at all good
+in the upper country.
+
+To a great evil great remedy.  I had said to M. de Frontenac that the
+25 per cent could be abolished and make it up on something else, as it
+is a question of saving the country, but he did not deem fit of
+anything being said about it.
+
+I also told him and M. de Champigny that we might treat with a Dutchman
+to bring on a clearance English and Dutch goods which are much thought
+of by our indians for their good quality and their price, that this
+vessel would not go up the river but stay below at a stated place,
+where we could go for his goods, and give him beaver for his rightful
+lading.
+
+The company should have the control of these merchandise, so as to sell
+them to the indians on the base of a tariff, so as to prevent the
+greediness of the _voyageurs_ which contributes very much to the
+discontent of the natives, because at first the French only went to the
+Hurons and since to Michilimakinac where they sold to the Indians of
+the locality, who then went to exchange with other indians in distant
+woods, lands and rivers, but now the said Frenchmen holding permits to
+have a larger gain pass over all the Ottawas and Indians of
+Michilimakinac to go themselves and find the most distant tribes which
+displeased the former very much.
+
+This has led to fine discoveries and four or five hundred young men of
+Canada's best men are employed at this business.
+
+Through them we have become acquainted with several Indian's names we
+knew not, and 4 and 500 leagues farther away, there are other indians
+unknown to us.
+
+Down the Gulf in French Acadia, we have always known the Abenakis and
+Micmacs.
+
+On the north shore of the River, from Seven islands up we have always
+known the Papinachois, Montagnais, Poissons Blancs, (White Fish),
+(these being in what is called limits of Tadoussac), Mistassinis,
+Algonquins.
+
+
+AT QUEBEC
+
+There are Hurons, remains of the ancient Hurons, defeated by the
+Iroquois, in Lake Huron.
+
+There is also south of the Chaudi�re (River), five leagues from Quebec,
+a large village of Christian Abenakis.
+
+The Hurons & Abenakis are under the Jesuit Fathers.
+
+These Hurons have staid at Quebec so as to pray God more conveniently
+and without fear of the Iroquois.
+
+The Abenakis pray God with more fervor than any Indians of these
+countries.  I have seen and been twice with them when warring; they
+must have faith to believe as they do and their exactitude to live well
+according to principles of our religion.  Blessed be God!  They are
+very good men at war and those who have give and still give so much
+trouble to the Bostoners.
+
+
+AT THREE-RIVERS
+
+Wolves and Algonquins both sides of the river.
+
+
+AT MONTROYAL OR VILLE-MARIE
+
+There are Iroquois of the five nations who have left their home to pray
+(everyone is free to believe) but it is certain that threefourths have
+no other motive nor interest to stay with us than to pray.
+
+There are, then, Senecas, Mohawks, Cayugas, Wyandotts, Oneida partly on
+the mountain of Mont-Royal under the direction of Messrs of St Sulpice,
+and partly at the Sault (Recollet) south side, that is to say, above
+the rapids, under the R. F. Jesuits, whose mission is larger than St
+Sulpice's.
+
+150 leagues from Mont Royal the Grand River leading to the Ottawas; to
+the north are the Temiscamingues, Abitiby, Outanloubys, who speak
+Algonquin.
+
+At lake Nepissing, the Nipissiniens, Algonquin language, always going
+up the Grand River.
+
+In lake Huron, 200 leagues from Montreal, the Mississagues and
+Amikou�s: Algonquins.
+
+At Michilimackinac, the Negoaschendaching or people of the Sable,
+Ottawas, Linage Kikacons or Cut Tail, the men from Forked Lake
+Onnasaccoctois, the Hurons, in all 1000 men or thereabouts half Huron
+and half Algonquin language.
+
+In the Michigan or lake Illinois, north side, the Noquets, Algonquins,
+Malomini (Menomeenee), or men of the Folle-Avoine: different language.
+
+
+SOUTH OF PUANTS (GREEN) BAY
+
+The Wanebagoes otherwise Puans, because of the name of the Bay;
+language different from the two others.
+
+The Sakis, 3 leagues from the Bay, and Pottewatamis, about 200 warriors.
+
+Towards lake Illinois, on River St Joseph, the Miamis or men of the
+Crane who have three different languages, though they live together.
+United they would form about 600 men.
+
+Above the Bay, on Fox river, the Ottagamis, the Mascoutins and the
+Kicapoos: all together 1200 men.
+
+At Maramegue river where is situated Nicholas Perrot's post, are some
+more Miamis numbering five to six hundred; always the same language.
+
+The Illinois midway on the Illinois river making 5 to 6 different
+villages, making in all 2000 men.
+
+We traffic with all these nations who are all at war with the Iroquois.
+In the lower Missipy there are several other nations very numerous with
+whom we have no commerce and who are trading yet with nobody.
+
+Above Missoury river which is of the Mississippi below the river
+Illinois, to the south, there are the Mascoutins Nadoessioux, with whom
+we trade, and who are numerous.
+
+Sixty leagues above the missisipi and St Anthony of Padua Fall, there
+is lake Issaquy otherwise lake of Buade, where there are 23 villages of
+Sioux Nadoessioux who are called Issaquy, and beyond lake Oettatous,
+lower down the auctoustous, who are Sioux, and could muster together
+4000 warriors.  Because of their remoteness they only know the Iroquois
+from what they heard the French say.
+
+In lake Superior, south side are the saulteurs who are called Ouchijoe
+(objibway), Macomili, Ouxcinacomigo, Mixmac and living at Chagoumigon,
+it is the name of the country, the Malanas or men of the Cat-fish; 60
+men; always the Algonquin language.
+
+Michipicoten, name of the land; the Machacoutiby and Opendachiliny,
+otherwise Dung-heads; lands' men; algonquin language.  The Picy is the
+name of a land of men, way inland, who come to trade.
+
+Bagoasche, also name of a place of men of same nation who come also to
+trade 200 and 300 men.
+
+Osepisagny river being discharge of lake Asemipigon; sometimes the
+indians of the lake come to trade; they are called Kristinos and the
+nation of the Great Rat.  These men are Algonquins, numbering more than
+2000, and also go to trade with the English of the north.
+
+There are too the Chichigoe who come sometimes to us, sometimes north
+to the English.
+
+Towards West-Northwest, it is nations called Fir-trees; numerous; all
+their traffic is with the English.
+
+All those north nations are rovers, as was said, living on fish and
+game or wild-oats which is abundant on the shores of their lakes and
+rivers.
+
+In lake Ontario, south side, the five Iroquois nations; our enemies;
+about 1200 warriors live on indian corn and by hunting.
+
+We can say, that, of all the Indians they are the most cruel during
+war, as during peace they are the most humane, hospitable, and
+sociable; they are sensible at their meetings, and their behaviour
+resembles much to the manners of republics of Europe.
+
+Lake Ontario has 200 leagues in circumference.
+
+Lake Erie above Niagara 250 leagues; lakes Huron and Michigan joined
+552 leagues: to have access to these three lakes by boat, there is only
+the portage of Niagara, of two leagues, above the said lake Ontario.
+
+All those who have been through those lakes say they are terrestrial
+paradises for abundance of venison, game, fishing, and good quality of
+the land.
+
+From the said lakes to go to lake Superior there is only one portage of
+15 (?).  The said lake is 500 leagues long in a straight line, from
+point to point, without going around coves nor the bays of Michipicoten
+and Kaministiquia.
+
+To go from lake Superior to lake Asemipigon there is only 15 leagues to
+travel, in which happen seven portages averaging 3 good leagues; the
+said lake has a circumference of 280 leagues.
+
+From lake Huron to lake Nipissing there is the river called French
+River, 25 leagues long; there are 3 portages; the said lake has 60 to
+80 leagues of circumference.
+
+Lake Assiniboel is larger than lake Superior, and an infinity of
+others, lesser and greater have to be discovered, for which I approve
+of M. the Marquis of Denonville's saying, often repeated:--that the
+King of France, our monarch was not high lord enough to open up such a
+vast country, as we are only beginning to enter on the confines of the
+immensity of such a great country.
+
+The road to enter it is by the Grand River and lake Ontario by Niagara,
+which should be easy in peaceful times in establishing families at
+Niagara for the portage, and building boats on Lake Erie.  I did not
+find that a difficult thing, and I want to do it under M. the Marquis
+of Denonville, who did not care, so soon as he perceived that his war
+expedition had not succeeded.
+
+I have given you in this memorandum the names of the natives known to
+us and with whom our wood rovers (coureurs de bois) have traded; my
+information comes from some of the most experienced.
+
+The surplus of the memorandum will serve to inform you that prior to M.
+de Tracy, de Courcelle and Talon's arrival, nothing was regulated but
+by the governor's will, although there was a Board; as they were his
+appointments and that by appearances, only his creatures got in, he was
+the absolute master of it and which was the cause that the Colony and
+the inhabitants suffered very much at the beginning.
+
+M. de Tracy on his arrival by virtue of his commission dismissed the
+Board and the Councillors, to appoint another one with members chosen
+by himself and the Bishop, which existed until the 2nd and 3rd year of
+M. de Frontenac's reign, who had them granted at Court, provisions by a
+decree for the establishment of the Council.
+
+It is only from that time that the King having given the country over
+to the gentlemen of the Co'y of West Indies, the tax of one fourth and
+the Tadoussac trade were looked upon as belonging to the Company, and
+since to the King, because M. Talon, who crippled as much as he could,
+this company dare not touch to these two items of the Domain, of which
+the enjoyment remained to them until cessation of their lease.
+
+So, it was in favor of this company that all the regulations were
+granted in reference to the limits and working out of Tadoussac as well
+as to prevent cheating on the beaver tax.
+
+Tadoussac is leased to six gentlemen for the sum of ---- yearly; I took
+shares for one fourth, as it was an occasion to dispose of some goods
+and a profit to everyone of at most 20 ---- yearly.
+
+About beavers there is no fraud to be feared, everybody preferring to
+get letters of exchange to avoid the great difficulties on going out,
+the entry and sale in France, and of large premiums for the risks; in a
+word, no one defrauds nor thinks of it.  The office is not large enough
+to receive all the beaver.
+
+The ships came in very late; I could not get M. Dumenu the secretary to
+the Board to send you the regulations you ask for the beaver trade; you
+shall have them, next year, if it pleases God.  They contain
+prohibition to embark from France under a penalty of 3000 livres' fine,
+confiscation of the goods, even of the ships; however, under the treaty
+of Normandy, I had a Dieppe captain seized for about 200 crowns worth
+of beaver, and the Council here confiscated the vessel, and imposed a
+fine of 1500 livres, on which the captain appealed to France, and he
+obtained at the King's Council, replevin on his ship and the fine was
+reduced to 30 livres.
+
+As prior to M. Talon nobody sent traders in the woods as explained in
+this memorandum there was not to my knowledge any regulation as to the
+said woods before the decree of 1675.  On the contrary I remember that
+those two individuals under M. de Lauzon's government who brought in
+each for 14. or 15,000 livres applied to me to be exempted from the tax
+of one fourth, because, they said we were obliged to them for having
+brought down a fleet which enriched the country.
+
+(Not signed.)
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+[Transcriber's note: Many index entries contain references like the "9
+n." in the "Arms" entry.  The "n." appears to refer to the footnote(s)
+that were on their host pages in the original book.  In this e-book,
+all footnotes have been moved to the end of their respective chapters.]
+
+
+A
+
+Abenaki Indians, the, 363.
+
+Abitiby Indians, the, 364.
+
+Acadia, Indian tribes located in, 363.
+
+Albanel, Charles, Jesuit missionary, 141; overland trip of, to Hudson
+Bay, 143-146; at King Charles Fort, 147.
+
+Albany (Orange), 32; Iroquois freebooting expedition against, 36-38;
+Radisson's escape to, 39-41.
+
+Algonquin Indian, murder of Mohawk hunters by a, 20.
+
+Algonquin Indians, Radisson and Groseillers travel to the West with,
+73-79; territory of the, 359; wars with the Iroquois, 359-360; tribes
+of, on Lake Huron, 364.
+
+Allemand, Pierre, companion of Radisson, 154.
+
+Allouez, P�re Claude, 142.
+
+Amsterdam, Radisson's early visit to, 42.
+
+Arctic Ocean, Hearne's overland trip to, 257-265; arrival at, 265-266;
+Mackenzie's trip of exploration to, 281-286.
+
+Arms, supplied to Mohawks by Dutch, 9 n.; desire for, cause of Sioux'
+friendliness to Radisson, 120, 122.
+
+Assiniboine Indians, origin of name, 10 n., 85; Radisson learns of,
+from prairie tribes, 85; defence of the younger Groseillers by, 184; De
+la V�rendrye meets the, 218-221; accompany De la V�rendrye to the
+Mandans, 223-227; Saint-Pierre's encounter with, 237.
+
+Assiniboine River, 218, 219, 221-222.
+
+Athabasca country, Hearne explores the, 268-269.
+
+Athabasca Lake; Hearne's arrival at, 268-269.
+
+Athabasca River, 277.
+
+Athabascan tribes, Matonabbee and the, 249.
+
+Aulneau, Father, 210, 211; killed by Indians, 214.
+
+
+B
+
+Baptism of Indian children by Radisson and Groseillers, 92.
+
+Barren lands, region of "Little Sticks," 253-254, 259-260.
+
+Bath of purification, Indian, 14, 268.
+
+Bay of the North.  _See_ Hudson Bay.
+
+Bayly, Charles, governor of Hudson's Bay Company, 140; in Canada,
+140-142; encounter with the Jesuit Albanel, 141-142, 147; accusations
+against Radisson and Groseillers, 147-148.
+
+Bear, Lewis's experience with a, 318.
+
+Beauharnois, Charles de, governor of New France, 201, 203, 235.
+
+_Beaux Hommes_, Crow Indians, 232.
+
+Beckworth, prisoner among Missouri Indians, 33.
+
+Belmont, Abb�, cited, 5 n., 98 n.
+
+Bering, Vitus, 195.
+
+Bigot, intendant of New France, 236.
+
+Bird, prisoner of the Blackfeet, 33.
+
+Bird's egg moon, the (June), 279.
+
+Blackbird, Omaha chief, grave of, 311.
+
+Bochart, governor of Three Rivers.  _See_ Duplessis-Kerbodot.
+
+Bo�sme, Louis, 70.
+
+_Boissons_, drinking matches, 280.
+
+Boston, Radisson and Groseillers in, 136.
+
+Bourassa, _voyageur_, 213.
+
+Bourdon, Jean, explorations by, 102, 134 n.
+
+Bow Indians, the, 232-233.
+
+Bridgar, John, governor of Hudson's Bay Company, 166, 169, 171, 173,
+174, 175, 180.
+
+Brower, J. V., cited, 88 n.
+
+Bryce, Dr. George, 6 n., 88 n., 187 n.
+
+Buffalo-hunts, Sioux, 92 n., 124.
+
+Button, Sir Thomas, explorations of, 134 n.
+
+
+C
+
+Cadieux, exploit and death of, 197-198.
+
+Cameahwait, Snake Indian chief, 324-326.
+
+Cannibalism among Indians, 24, 77.
+
+Cannibals of the Barren Lands, 255.
+
+Cape Breton, discovery and fortification of, 350.
+
+Caribou, Radisson's remarks on, 127.
+
+Caribou herds in Barren Lands, 255; Indian method of hunting, 259.
+
+Carr, George, letter from, to Lord Darlington, 136 n.
+
+Carr, Sir Robert, urges Radisson to renounce France, 136.
+
+Carrier, Jacques, 71, 193, 350-351.
+
+Cartwright, Sir George, Radisson and Groseillers sail with, 136-137;
+shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+
+Catlin, cited, 14 n., 226.
+
+Cayuga Indians, the, 34, 55, 364.
+
+Chaboneau, guide to Lewis and Clark, 312, 326, 332.
+
+Chame, M., commissioner of Company of Normandy, 355, 357.
+
+Champlain, governor in Canada, 351-353.
+
+Charlevoix, mission of, 202.
+
+Chichigoe tribe of Indians, the, 365.
+
+Chinook Indians, Lewis and Clark friends with, 328.
+
+Chipewyans, bath of purification practised by, 14 n.; Hearne's journey
+with, 257-263; massacre of Eskimo by, 263-265.
+
+Chouart, M., letters of, 335-337.  _See_ Groseillers, Jean Baptiste.
+
+Chouart, M�dard.   See Groseillers, M�dard Chouart.
+
+_Chronique Trifluvienne_, Sulte's, 4 n.
+
+Clark, William, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 308-309; exploration of
+Yellowstone River by, 329; hero-qualities of, 332-333.  _See_ Lewis.
+
+Clatsop Indians, Lewis and Clark among the, 328.
+
+Clearwater River, Lewis and Clark on the, 327.
+
+Coal, use of, by Indians, 89.
+
+Colbert, Radisson pardoned and commissioned by, 148; withholds
+advancement from Radisson, 152; summons Radisson and Groseillers to
+France, 176-177; death of, 177.
+
+Colleton, Sir Peter, shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+
+Colter, frontiersman with Lewis and Clark, 332.
+
+Columbia River, Lewis and Clark travel down the, 327.
+
+Company of Miscou, the, 352.
+
+Company of Normandy, the, 354-357.
+
+Company of the North, the, 151, 154, 175, 176.
+
+Company of One Hundred Associates, the, 133, 352, 353.
+
+Company of Tadoussac, the, 352.
+
+Company of the West Indies, the, 133, 153; account of formation of, 357.
+
+Comport�, M., letter to, from M. Chouart, 335-336.
+
+Coppermine River ("Far-Off-Metal River"), 245, 249, 252, 262, 267.
+
+Copper mines, Radisson receives reports of, 112, 124; discovery of, by
+Hearne, 267.
+
+Council Bluffs, origin of name, 311.
+
+Council pipe, smoking the, 16, 29.
+
+Couture, explorations of, 103, 129-130.
+
+Couture (the younger), 143.
+
+Cree Indians, first reports of, 69, 85; Radisson's second visit to,
+112-113, 116; wintering in a settlement of, 117; a famine among,
+118-119; De la V�rendrye assisted by, 206-208.
+
+Crow Indians, De la V�rendrye's sons among, 232-233.
+
+
+D
+
+Dablon, Claude, Jesuit missionary, 103, 134 n., 142.
+
+D'Ailleboust, M., governor of Company of Normandy, 354.
+
+Dakota, Radisson's explorations in, 89.
+
+D'Argenson, Viscomte, governor of New France, 99, 129-130, 356-357, 360.
+
+D'Avaugour, governor, 104, 105, 107, 133, 143, 357, 360.
+
+Death-song, Huron, 24, 54.
+
+De Casson, Dollier, cited, 5 n., 96 n., 98 n.
+
+De la Galissonni�re, governor, 235.
+
+De la Jonqui�re, governor, 236.
+
+De Lanoue, fur-trade pioneer, 204.
+
+De la V�rendrye, Francois, 215, 222, 229, 230, 233.
+
+De la V�rendrye, Jean Baptiste, 197, 205, 208-209, 210, 212; murder of,
+by Sioux, 214.
+
+De la V�rendrye, Louis, 215, 229.
+
+De la V�rendrye, Pierre, 215, 222, 229, 230, 235, 315.
+
+De la V�rendrye, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, leaves Montreal on search
+for Western Sea (1731), 194-197; at Nepigon, 201; previous career,
+201-203; traverses Lake Superior to Kaministiquia, 204; Fort St. Pierre
+named for, 206; among the Cree Indians, 206-208; return to Quebec to
+raise supplies, 210; loss of eldest son in Sioux massacre, 214;
+explores Minnesota and Manitoba to Lake Winnipeg, 215-216; at Fort
+Maurepas, 217; return to Montreal with furs, 218; explores valley of
+the Assiniboine, 219-221; visits the Mandan Indians, 224-225; takes
+possession for France of the Upper Missouri, 225; superseded by De
+Noyelles (1746), 235; decorated with Order of Cross of St. Louis, 235;
+death at Montreal, 236.
+
+De Niverville, lieutenant of Saint-Pierre, 236-237.
+
+Denonville, Marquis of, 336, 366, 367.
+
+De Noyelles, supersession of De la V�rendrye by, 235.
+
+De Noyon, explorations of, 204.
+
+Dieppe, merchants of, interested in Canada trade, 352, 353.
+
+Dionne, Dr. N. E., cited, 76 n., 88 n., 106 n., 139 n.
+
+Dog Rib Indians, Mackenzie among, 283-284.
+
+Dollard, fight of, against the Iroquois, 96-98, 198.
+
+Dreuillettes, Gabriel, discoveries by, 70-71, 103, 134 n.
+
+Drewyer, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 331.
+
+Drugging of Indians, 63-64.
+
+Duchesnau, M. Jacques, 149 n., 358.
+
+Dufrost, Christopher, Sieur de la Jemmeraie, 197, 203, 205, 209, 210,
+211.
+
+Du P�ron, Francois, 47.
+
+Duplessis-Kerbodot, murder of, by Iroquois, 5 n., 19, 45.
+
+Dupuis, Major, at Onondaga, 46, 55-66.
+
+Dutch, arms supplied to Mohawk Indians by, 9 n.; war of, with the
+English, 137-138.
+
+
+E
+
+England, arrival of Radisson and Groseillers in, 137; effect of war
+between Holland and, on exploring propositions, 137-138; Hudson's Bay
+Company organized in, 139-140; fur-trading expeditions from, 140-149.
+_See_ Hudson's Bay Company _and_ Radisson.
+
+Erie Indians, the, 34.
+
+Eskimo, massacre of, by Chipewyans, 263-265.
+
+
+F
+
+"Far-Off-Metal River," the, 245, 249, 252; Hearne reaches the, 262.
+
+Feasts, Indian, 60, 62-63, 67 n.
+
+_Festins � tout manger_, 60, 67 n.
+
+Fields, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 330-331.
+
+Flathead Indians, assistance given Lewis and Clark by, 327, 328.
+
+Floyd, Sergeant, of Lewis and Clark's expedition, 332.
+
+Forked River, term applied to Mississippi and Missouri rivers, 86, 100;
+Radisson's account of people on the, 86-87.
+
+Fort, Dollard's so-called, at the Long Sault, 97; Radisson and
+Groseillers', in the Northwest, 114-115.
+
+Fort Bourbon (Port Royal), on Hayes River, 161-175, 182-186.
+
+Fort Bourbon, on Saskatchewan, 229.
+
+Fort Chipewyan, 277.
+
+Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark's winter quarters, 327-328.
+
+Fort Dauphin, 229.
+
+Fort King Charles, 139, 146.
+
+Fort Lajonqui�re, 237.
+
+Fort Mandan, stars and stripes hoisted at, 312.
+
+Fort Maurepas, construction, 209; description, 216-217; De la V�rendrye
+at, 217.
+
+Fort Orange, Radisson and the Iroquois at, 36-38; Radisson's escape to,
+39-41.
+
+Fort Poskoyac, 229, 235.
+
+Fort Prince of Wales, building of, 243; description, 244-245; Hearne
+becomes governor of, 270; surrender and destruction of, 271-272.
+
+Fort de la Reine, construction of, 222; De la V�rendrye returns to,
+after visiting Mandans, 228; abandonment of, 237.
+
+Fort Rouge, 221.
+
+Fort St. Charles, 208-209, 210, 215.
+
+Fort St. Louis, of Quebec, first fortification on site of, 351.
+
+Fort St. Pierre, 206.
+
+Fort William, 280, 283, 287.
+
+Fraser River, Mackenzie's explorations on, 294-302.
+
+Frog moon, the (May), 279.
+
+Frontenac, governor of New France, 154, 358, 360, 361, 362, 367.
+
+Fur companies of New France, 130, 133, 151, 153, 175-176, 352-358.
+
+Fur company, Hudson's Bay.  _See_ Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+Fur trade, the French, 101-102, 104; regulations governing the, 104,
+153 n.; effect of, on development of West, 113.
+
+
+G
+
+Gantlet, running the, 15-16.
+
+Gareau, Leonard, journey and death of, 70.
+
+Garneau, cited, 5 n., 87 n.
+
+Gillam, Ben, encounters with Radisson, 163-164, 168-175.
+
+Gillam, Zechariah, Radisson's first transactions with, 135-136;
+Groseillers' voyage to Hudson Bay with, 138-139; at Rupert River with
+Hudson's Bay Company ship, 148; active enmity of, toward Radisson,
+165-167, 168-169, 171, 176, 180.
+
+Godefroy, Jean, companion of Radisson, 154.
+
+Godefroy family, the, 154 n.
+
+Goose month (April), 253-254.
+
+Gorst, Thomas, 140 n., 147 n.
+
+Grand River of the North.  _See_ Mackenzie River.
+
+Gray, Captain, 308.
+
+Great Falls of the Missouri, Lewis discovers the, 317.
+
+Great Rat, nation of the, 131, 365.
+
+Green Bay, western limit of French explorations until Radisson, 69;
+Radisson's winter quarters at, 79-80, 99-100.
+
+Groseillers, nephew of explorer, title of nobility ordered granted to,
+142.
+
+Groseillers, Jean Baptiste, accompanies Radisson to Hudson Bay (1682),
+154; trip up Hayes River, 158, 161; left in charge of Fort Bourbon,
+175; troubles with Indians and with English, 182-183; surrenders fort
+to Radisson, acting for Hudson's Bay Company, 184; letters to mother,
+184, 335-337; carried to England by force, 186; offer from Hudson's Bay
+Company, 187.
+
+Groseillers, M�dard Chouart, birth, birthplace, and marriage, 45;
+journey to Lake Nipissing, 71; engages with Radisson in voyage of
+exploration to the West (1658), 71-79; winter quarters at Green Bay,
+79-80; explorations in West and Northwest, 80-90; return to Quebec, 99;
+second trip to Northwest (1661), 103-129; imprisoned and fined on
+return to Quebec (1663), 130; goes to France to seek reparation, 133;
+meets with neglect and indifference, 133-134; deceived into returning
+to Three Rivers and going to Isle Perc�e, 135; goes to Port Royal,
+N.S., becomes involved with Boston sea-captain, and reaches England
+_via_ Boston and Spain (1666), 135-137; backed by Prince Rupert, fits
+out ship for Hudson Bay, and spends year in trading expedition
+(1668-1669),138-139; on return to London, created a _Knight de la
+Jarreti�re_, 139; second voyage from England (1670), 140; involved with
+Radisson in suspicions of double-dealing, 147-148; in meeting of fur
+traders at Quebec, 149; retires to family at Three Rivers, 151;
+summoned by Radisson to join expedition in private French interests to
+Hayes River (1681-1682), 153-158; successful trade in furs, 158, 167;
+jealousy and lawsuits on return to Quebec, 175-176; summoned to France
+by Colbert (1684), 176-177; petition for redress of wrongs ignored by
+French court, 179; gives up struggle and retires to Three Rivers, 179.
+
+
+H
+
+Hayes, Sir James, 180, 181.
+
+Hayes River, Radisson's canoe trip up the, 158-160; Fort Bourbon
+established on, 161; Radisson's second visit to, 182-186.
+
+Hayet, Marguerite, Radisson's sister, 6 n., 43; death of first husband,
+19, 45; marriage with Groseillers, 45; letters from son, 184, 335-337.
+
+Hayet, S�bastien, 6 n., 43 n.
+
+Hearne, Samuel, cited, 14 n.; departure from Fort Prince of Wales on
+exploring trip, 249-252; in the Barren Lands, 253-255, 259-260; crosses
+the Arctic Circle, 261; discovers the Coppermine River, 262-263;
+massacre of Eskimo by Indians accompanying, 264-265; arrival at Arctic
+Ocean, 265; takes possession of Arctic regions for Hudson's Bay
+Company, 266-267; returns up the Coppermine River and discovers copper
+mines, 267; travels in Athabasca region, 268-269; returns to Fort
+Prince of Wales, 269; becomes governor of post, 270; surrenders fort to
+the French, 271-272.
+
+H�nault, Madeline, Radisson's mother, 6 n., 43.
+
+Hudson Bay, overland routes to, 71; Radisson's early discoveries
+regarding, 90-91, 127-128.
+
+_Hudson Bay_, Robson's, cited, 139 n., 140 n., 147 n., 161 n., 166 n.
+
+Hudson's Bay Company, origin of, 139-140; early expeditions, 140-149;
+distrust of Radisson by, 150; contract between Radisson and, 181-182;
+final treaty of peace made between Indians and, 185; poor treatment of
+Radisson by, 188; quietly prosperous career of, 241-242; encroachments
+of French traders, 242-243; demand for activity, 243-244; possession
+taken of Arctic regions for, by Hearne, 266-267.
+
+Huron Indians, death songs of, 24, 54; massacre of Christian, by
+Iroquois, 50-54; band of, with Dollard, against the Iroquois, 97-98;
+territory of, 359; tribes of, at Michilimackinac, 364.
+
+Husky dogs, 277.
+
+
+I
+
+Icebergs, Labradorian, 155.
+
+Iroquois Confederacy, the five tribes composing the, 34;
+characteristics of, 366.
+
+Iroquois Indians, murder of inhabitants of Three Rivers by, 5 n., 19,
+45; treatment of prisoners by, 15-16, 25-28, 54; Radisson's life with,
+16-39; Frenchmen at Montreal scalped by, 48; hostages of, held at
+Quebec, 48, 55-56; siege of Onondaga by, 55-67; encounters between
+Algonquins and Radisson and, 76-78, 79-80;  Radisson's fight with, on
+the Grand Sault, 94-96; Bollard's battle with, 97-98; Radisson's fights
+with, on second Western trip, 107-108, 109-111; wars between Algonquins
+and, 359.
+
+Isle of Massacres, 50-54.
+
+Issaguy tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+
+
+J
+
+Jemmeraie, Sieur de la, De la V�rendrye's lieutenant, 197, 203, 205,
+209, 210; death of, 211.
+
+_Jesuit Relations_, cited, 57 n., 69 n., 71 n., 73 n., 80 n., 81 n., 82
+n., 91 n., 92 n., 96 n., 141 n.; quoted, 88.
+
+Jesuits, in Onondaga expedition, 44-67; lives of Iroquois saved by, 65;
+start with Radisson and Groseillers on first Western expedition, 73;
+turn back to Montreal, 77.
+
+Jogues, Father, 4, 56, 68, 69.
+
+Jolliet, 84 n., 149, 151.
+
+
+K
+
+Kaministiquia, fur post at, 204.
+
+Kickapoo Indians, location of, 364.
+
+King Charles Fort.  _See_ Fort King Charles.
+
+Kirke, Mary, marriage with Radisson, 138; becomes a Catholic, 152.
+
+Kirke, Sir John, shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140; claims of,
+against New France, 152; forbids daughter's going to France, 152;
+friendly influence used for Radisson, 180.
+
+_Knight de la Jarreti�re_, Groseillers created a, 139.
+
+
+L
+
+La Barre, governor of New France, 176
+
+La Chesnaye, cited, 115 n., 131 n.; backs Radisson in Northern
+expedition, 152-153; outcome of Radisson's dealings with, 175-176.
+
+Lake Assiniboel, 366.
+
+"Lake of the Castors," the (Lake Nipissing), 76 n., 106 n., 364.
+
+Lake Ontario, tribes about, 366.
+
+Lake Superior, exploration of, by Radisson, 89; explorer's second visit
+to, 111-112.
+
+Lamoignon, M. de, president of Company of Normandy, 355, 356, 357.
+
+La Perouse, French admiral, 271.
+
+Larivi�re, companion of Radisson and Groseillers, 105, 106-107.
+
+La Salle, 84 n., 85, 149, 151, 194.
+
+Lauzon, M. de, governor of Company of Normandy, 355-356, 368.
+
+La Valli�re, 103.
+
+La V�rendrye.  _See_ De la V�rendrye.
+
+Ledyard, John, 308.
+
+_Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_, cited, 46 n., 58 n., 60 n., 63 n.,
+81 n., 90 n., 96 n., 98 n., 139 n.
+
+Lewis, Meriwether, starts on expedition to explore Missouri and
+Columbia rivers, 308-309; reaches villages of Mandan Indians, 311-313;
+first views the Rocky Mountains, 314-315; discovers the Great Falls of
+the Missouri, 317; narrowly escapes death from a bear, 318-319; enters
+the Gates of the Rockies, 321; reaches sources of the Missouri,
+322-323; makes friends with Snake Indians, 323-327; crosses Divide to
+the Clearwater River and travels down the Columbia, 327; arrival on
+Pacific Ocean, 327; winters at Fort Clatsop (1805-1806), 327-328;
+return trip by main stream of the Missouri, 329; adventures with
+Minnetaree Indians, 329-331; arrival at St. Louis, 332; tribute to
+character and qualities of, 332-333.
+
+Liberte, traitor in Lewis and Clark's expedition, 311.
+
+Little Missouri, Lewis and Clark pass the, 313.
+
+"Little Sticks," region of, 253-254, 259-260.
+
+London, Radisson's first visit to, 137-138.
+
+Long Sault, Rapids of, Dollard's battle at, 96-98, 198.
+
+Lord Preston, English envoy in France, 177, 180, 181.
+
+Low, A. P., quoted, 128 n., 146 n., 149 n.
+
+
+M
+
+Mackay, Alexander, Mackenzie's lieutenant, 288, 291, 292, 293, 296, 299.
+
+Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, early career of, 276; stationed at Fort
+Chipewyan, 276-277; exploration of Mackenzie River by, 280-285; crosses
+the Arctic Circle, 285; reaches Arctic Ocean, 285-286; returns up the
+Mackenzie to Fort Chipewyan, 286; exploration of Peace River by,
+288-294; discovers source of Peace River, 294; crosses the Divide and
+reaches head waters of Fraser River, 294; travels down the Fraser,
+294-298; adventures with Indians, 298-300; reaches the Pacific Ocean,
+302-303; return to Fort Chipewyan _via_ Peace River, 304-305; later
+life, 306.
+
+Mackenzie, Charles, 311.
+
+Mackenzie, Roderick, 278, 279.
+
+Mackenzie River, exploration of, 280-287, 296-302.
+
+Mandan Indians, bath of purification practised by, 14 n.; Radisson
+discovers the, 86, 88; De la V�rendrye's visit to, 222, 225-227; the
+younger De la V�rendryes' second visit to, 230-231; Lewis and Clark at
+villages of, 311-313, 332.
+
+Manitoba, Radisson's explorations in, 113-128.
+
+Marquette, P�re, 84 n.
+
+Martin, Abraham, Plains of Abraham named for, 45 n.
+
+Martin, Helen, Groseillers' first wife, 45 n.
+
+Martini�re, plan of, to capture Radisson for French, 188.
+
+Mascoutins, "people of the fire," 80, 131 n., 364, 365; location of
+the, 86; Radisson among the, 100.
+
+Matonabbee, chief of Chipewyans, 248-249; aid afforded Hearne by,
+256-263; massacre of Eskimo directed by, 264-265; suicide of, 272.
+
+M�nard, Father, 105, 112.
+
+Messaiger, Father, 204, 205, 209.
+
+Miami Indians, location of the, 364.
+
+Michigan, Indian tribes in, 364.
+
+Michilimackinac, Island of, Radisson; passes, 112; early headquarters
+of fur trade, 201; Indian tribes at, 364.
+
+Micmac Indians, the, 363.
+
+Minnesota, dispute as to discovery of eastern, 71 n.; Radisson's
+explorations in, 89; Radisson may have wintered in, on second trip, 113.
+
+Minnetaree Indians, Lewis and the, 329-331.
+
+Mississippi, Radisson discovers the Upper, 80-81.
+
+Mississippi Valley, Radisson first to explore the, 85-89.
+
+Missouri, tribes of the, 86; De la V�rendrye takes possession of the
+Upper, 225; Lewis and Clark explore the, 313-323.
+
+Mistassini, Lake, Father Albanel at, 146.
+
+Mistassini Indians, the, 363.
+
+Mohawk Indians, murder of French of Three Rivers by, 5 n., 19, 45;
+adoption of Radisson by a family of, 17; murder of three, by Radisson
+and an Algonquin, 20; jealous as to French settlement among Onondagas,
+47-48; siege of Onondaga by, 55-59; outwitted by Radisson at Onondaga,
+59-67; location of the, 364.
+
+Montagnais Indians, the, 363.
+
+Montana, punishment of Indians by scouts in, 25 n.
+
+Montmagny, M. de, governor in Canada, 353-354.
+
+Montreal, expedition for Onondaga leaves, 47; Iroquois scalp Frenchmen
+at, 48; return of Onondaga party, 66; De la V�rendrye's departure from,
+194-197; Indian tribes located in vicinity of, 363-364.
+
+Munck, explorations of, 134 n.
+
+
+N
+
+"Nation of the Grand Rat," 131, 365.
+
+Nelson River, Radisson on the, 140, 161, 164-167, 170-174, 179 n.
+
+Nemisco River, called the Rupert, 139.
+
+Nepigon, De la V�rendrye at, 201, 202.
+
+New York in 1653, 41-42.
+
+_New York Colonial Documents_, 9 n.
+
+Nez Perces Indians, help given to Lewis and Clark by, 328.
+
+Nicolet, Jean, 68, 69.
+
+Nicolls, Colonel Richard, quoted, 136 n.
+
+Nipissing, Lake, 76 n., 106 n., 364.
+
+Nipissinien Indians, the, 364.
+
+Northwest, the Great, discovery of, by Radisson, 80-85.
+
+Northwest Fur Company, the, 279, 280, 287.
+
+Northwest Passage, reward of L20,000 offered for discovery of, 278.
+
+Norton, Marie, 247, 270, 271-272.
+
+Norton, Moses, governor of Fort Prince of Wales, 244; character of,
+246-247; death of, 269-270.
+
+
+O
+
+Ochagach, Indian hunter, 202.
+
+Octbaton tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+
+Ojibway Indians, 115, 365.
+
+Oldmixon, John, cited, 92 n., 114 n., 130 n., 147 n.
+
+Omaha Indians, Radisson's possible visit to, 86, 88.
+
+Omtou tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+
+Oneida Indians, the, 34, 364.
+
+Onondaga, settlement at, 46; Iroquois conspiracy against, 46-48;
+garrison besieged at, 55-63; escape of French from, 64-67.
+
+Onondaga tribe, the, 34; Jesuit mission among (1656), 46-47;
+treacherous conduct of, toward Christian Hurons, 50-54.
+
+Orange.  _See_ Albany.
+
+Orimha, Radisson's Mohawk name, 16.
+
+Oudiette, Jean, 154 n.
+
+"Ouinipeg," Lake, 69, 71.
+
+Outanlouby Indians, the, 364.
+
+
+P
+
+Pacific Ocean, Mackenzie's expedition reaches the, 302-303; Lewis and
+Clark's expedition reaches, 327.
+
+Papinachois Indians, the, 363.
+
+Parkman, Francis, cited, 5 n., 19 n., 46 n., 87 n., 96 n.
+
+_Pays d'en Haut_, "Up-Country," defined, 201 n.
+
+Peace River, the, 281; exploration of, 287; Mackenzie reaches the
+source of the, 294.
+
+Pemmican, defined, 223.
+
+"People of the Fire," the, Mascoutin Indians, 80 n., 86 n., 100, 131 n.
+
+Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior, the, 112.
+
+Piescaret, Algonquin chief, 4.
+
+Pipe of peace, smoking the, 121-123.
+
+Plains of Abraham, named for Abraham Martin, 45 n.
+
+Poinsy, M. de, commander at St. Christopher, 353.
+
+Poissons Blancs (White Fish) Indians, the, 363.
+
+Poncet, P�re, 41.
+
+Port Nelson, 140, 161-175, 182-186.
+
+Port Royal, Nova Scotia, Radisson and Groseillers at, 135.
+
+Prince Maximilian, 226.
+
+Prince Rupert, patron of French explorers, 138-139, 180; first governor
+of Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+
+Prisoners, treatment of, by Iroquois, 15-16, 25-28, 54.
+
+Prudhomme, Mr. Justice, 88 n.
+
+Purification, bath of, Indian rite, 14, 268.
+
+
+Q
+
+Quebec, Iroquois hostages for safety of Onondaga held at, 48, 55-56;
+celebration at, on return of Radisson and Groseillers, 99; meeting of
+fur traders at (1676), 149; Indian tribes located about, 363.
+
+
+R
+
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit (the elder), 6 n., 43 n.
+
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit, uncle of the explorer, 43 n.
+
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit, date and place of birth, 6; genealogy of, 6
+n., 43 n.; captured by Iroquois Indians, 9; adopted into Mohawk tribe,
+17; escape to Fort Orange (1653), 39-41; proof of Catholicism of, 41
+n.; visits Europe and returns to Three Rivers (1654), 42-44; joins
+expedition to Onondaga (1657), 47; besieged by Iroquois throughout
+winter, 55-64; saves the garrison and returns to Montreal, 65-67; goes
+on trapping and exploring trip to the West (1658), 73-74; reaches Lake
+Nipissing and Lake Huron, 78; in winter quarters at Green Bay, 79-80;
+crosses present state of Wisconsin and discovers Upper Mississippi,
+80-85; explorations to the west and south, 86-89; in Minnesota and
+Manitoba, 89-91; encounter with Iroquois at Long Sault of the Ottawa,
+94-96; at scene of Dollard's fight of a week before, 96-98; arrival at
+Quebec (1660), 99; sets forth on voyage of discovery toward Hudson Bay
+(1661), 105; traverses Lake Superior, 111-112; builds fort and winters
+west of present Duluth, 113-116; visits the Sioux, 123-124; reaches
+Lake Winnipeg, 127; returns to Quebec (1663), 129; bad treatment by
+French officials, 130; goes to France to gain his rights, 133-134;
+ill-treatment, deception by Rochelle merchant, dealings with Captain
+Gillam of Boston, and visit to Boston (1665), 134-136; goes to England,
+137-138; marriage with Mary Kirke, 138; formation of Hudson's Bay
+Company (1670), 139-140; trading voyage to Port Nelson (1671), 140-141;
+recalled to England and poorly treated (1674-1675), 148; receives
+commission in French navy (1675-1676), 148; complications between
+wife's father and French government, 152; backed by La Chesnaye,
+engages in new expedition to Hudson Bay, 152-153; returns to Quebec
+(1681) and sails to Hayes River (1682), 153-158; troubles with English
+and Boston ships, 161-175; jealousy and lawsuits on return to Quebec,
+175-177; unsuccessfully presses claims in France, 179-180; commissioned
+by Hudson's Bay Company, 181-182; sails to Hayes River and takes
+possession of Fort Bourbon and French furs (1684), 182-185; return to
+England, 186-187; annual voyages to Hudson Bay for five years, 188;
+distrusted on breaking out of war with France, and neglect in old age,
+188-189: consideration of character and career, 189-190.
+
+_Radisson's Relation_, cited, 9 n., 46 n., 63 n., 80 n., 81 n., 98 n.,
+99 n., 122, 127, 163 n., 179; language used in, 82; time of writing,
+138.
+
+Ragueneau, Father Paul, 46 n., 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59 n., 63 n.
+
+Rascal Village, Indian camp, 305.
+
+Red River, first white men on, 219.
+
+Rhythm as an Indian characteristic, 160 n.
+
+Ricaree Indians, insolence of, to Lewis and Clark, 311-312.
+
+Robson, cited, 139, 140, 147, 161, 166.
+
+Rochelle, Radisson's visit to, in 1654, 43.
+
+Rocky Mountains, Radisson's nearest approach to the, 89; Pierre de la
+V�rendrye reaches the, 233; Lewis's first view of the, 314-315; Lewis
+and Clark enter Gates of the, 321.
+
+Rouen, merchants of, interested in Canada trade, 352, 353, 357.
+
+Roy, J. Edmond, cited, 102 n.
+
+Roy, R., translations of documents, 335.
+
+Rupert River, the Nemisco renamed the, 139.
+
+
+S
+
+Sacajawea, squaw guide to Lewis and Clark, 312, 321, 326, 332.
+
+St. Louis, departure of Lewis and Clark's expedition from, 308-309;
+return to, 332.
+
+Saint-Lusson, Sieur de, 142.
+
+Saint-Pierre, Legardeur de, 236-237.
+
+Saskatchewan River, exploration of, 229.
+
+Sautaux Indians, the, 89-90, 92 n., 131 n., 365.
+
+Scalp dance, the, 12, 14.
+
+Seneca Indians, the, 34, 55, 364.
+
+Sioux Indians, the, 69; Radisson and the, 85, 88, 120-124; desire of,
+for firearms, 120, 122; location of the, 365.
+
+Skull-crackers, Indian, defined, 25, 121.
+
+Slave Lake, Mackenzie on, 282.
+
+Slave Lake Indians, the, 280, 282, 290.
+
+Smith, Donald (Lord Strathcona), 275-276.
+
+Snake Indians, Lewis and Clark make friends with, 323-326.
+
+Society of One Hundred.  _See_ Company of One Hundred Associates.
+
+Songs, Indian, 159, 160.
+
+Sturgeons, Radisson's river of, 112.
+
+Sulte, Benjamin, cited, 4, 5 n., 6 n., 7 n., 19 n., 43 n., 68 n., 76
+n., 86 n., 99 n., 102 n., 139 n., 154 n.
+
+
+T
+
+Tadoussac (Quebec), Company of, 352.
+
+Talon, intendant of New France, 7 n., 142-143, 357-358, 360, 367, 368.
+
+Tanguay, Abb�, 5 n., 19 n., 88 n.
+
+Tar bed, Mackenzie's discovery of a, in the Arctic, 286.
+
+Temiscamingue Indians, the, 364.
+
+Thousand Islands, massacre of Huron captives by Iroquois at, 53-54.
+
+Three Forks of the Missouri, Lewis and Clark arrive at, 321.
+
+Three Rivers, population of, 7 n.; in 1654, 44-45; De la V�rendrye born
+at, 201; Indians of, 363.
+
+Touret, Eli Godefroy, French spy, 137.
+
+Torture, Indian methods of, 15-16, 25-28, 54.
+
+_Travaille_, defined, 224.
+
+_Tripe de roches_, defined, 78.
+
+
+V
+
+V�rendrye.  _See_ De la V�rendrye.
+
+Ville-Marie (Montreal), Indian tribes about, 363-364.
+
+Voorhis, Mrs. Julia Clark, Clark letters owned by, 312 n.
+
+
+W
+
+Wampum, significance to Indians, 17.
+
+War-cry, Indian, sounds representing the, 11 n.
+
+Waste, viewed by Indians as crime, 60.
+
+West Indies Company.  _See_ Company of the West Indies.
+
+Windsor, member of Lewis and Clark's expedition, 315-316.
+
+Winnipeg, Lake, first reports of, 69, 71; Radisson arrives at, 127;
+rumours of a tide on, 216; De la V�rendrye on, 216-218.
+
+Wisconsin, Radisson's travels in, 80-8l, 89.
+
+Wolf Indians located at Three Rivers, 363.
+
+Wyandotte Indians, the, 364.
+
+
+Y
+
+Yellowstone River, exploration of, by Lewis and Clark, 313, 329.
+
+York (Port Nelson), 140, 161-175, 182-186.
+
+Young, Sir William, champions Radisson's cause, 180, 181, 188.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pathfinders of the West, by A. C. Laut
+
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+<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+
+<TITLE>
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pathfinders of the West, by A. C. Laut
+</TITLE>
+
+<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
+BODY { color: Black;
+       background: White;
+       margin-right: 10%;
+       margin-left: 10%;
+       font-size: medium;
+       font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
+       text-align: justify }
+
+P {text-indent: 4% }
+
+P.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
+
+P.poem {text-indent: 0%;
+        margin-left: 10%;
+        font-size: small }
+
+P.letter {font-size: small }
+
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+<BODY>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pathfinders of the West, by A. C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Pathfinders of the West
+       Being the Thrilling Story of the Adventures of the Men Who
+              Discovered the Great Northwest: Radisson, La V�rendrye,
+              Lewis and Clark
+
+Author: A. C. Laut
+
+Release Date: April 20, 2006 [EBook #18216]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATHFINDERS OF THE WEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="Stealing from the Fort by Night." BORDER="2" WIDTH="627" HEIGHT="413">
+<H4>
+[Frontispiece: Stealing from the Fort by Night.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+Pathfinders of the West
+</H1>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BEING
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<I>
+THE THRILLING STORY OF THE ADVENTURES
+<BR>
+OF THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED
+<BR>
+THE GREAT NORTHWEST
+</I>
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RADISSON, LA V�RENDRYE, LEWIS AND CLARK
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+A. C. LAUT
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+AUTHOR OF "LORDS OF THE NORTH," "HERALDS
+<BR>
+OF EMPIRE," "STORY OF THE TRAPPER"
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+<I>
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+<BR>
+REMINGTON, GOODWIN, MARCHAND
+<BR>
+AND OTHERS
+</I>
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+NEW YORK
+<BR>
+GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP
+<BR>
+PUBLISHERS
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+COPYRIGHT, 1904,
+<BR>
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+<BR><BR><BR>
+Set up and electrotyped.  Published November, 1904.  Reprinted February,
+1906.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+WILDWOOD PLACE, WASSAIC, N.Y.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+August 15, 1904.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+DEAR MR. SULTE:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A few years ago, when I was a resident of the Far West and tried to trace
+the paths of early explorers, I found that all authorities&mdash;first,
+second, and third rate&mdash;alike referred to one source of information for
+their facts.  The name in the tell-tale footnote was invariably your own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While I assume <I>all</I> responsibility for upsetting the apple cart of
+established opinions by this book, will you permit me to dedicate it to
+you as a slight token of esteem to the greatest living French-Canadian
+historian, from whom we have all borrowed and to whom few of us have
+rendered the tribute due?
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Faithfully,
+<BR>
+AGNES C. LAUT.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+MR. BENJAMIN SULTE,<BR>
+PRESIDENT ROYAL SOCIETY,<BR>
+OTTAWA, CANADA.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE GREAT NORTHWEST<BR>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+I love thee, O thou great, wild, rugged land<BR>
+Of fenceless field and snowy mountain height,<BR>
+Uprearing crests all starry-diademed<BR>
+Above the silver clouds!  A sea of light<BR>
+Swims o'er thy prairies, shimmering to the sight<BR>
+A rolling world of glossy yellow wheat<BR>
+That runs before the wind in billows bright<BR>
+As waves beneath the beat of unseen feet,<BR>
+And ripples far as eye can see--as far and fleet!<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Here's chances for every man!  The hands that work<BR>
+Become the hands that rule!  Thy harvests yield<BR>
+Only to him who toils; and hands that shirk<BR>
+Must empty go!  And here the hands that wield<BR>
+The sceptre work!  O glorious golden field!<BR>
+O bounteous, plenteous land of poet's dream!<BR>
+O'er thy broad plain the cloudless sun ne'er wheeled<BR>
+But some dull heart was brightened by its gleam<BR>
+To seize on hope and realize life's highest dream!<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Thy roaring tempests sweep from out the north--<BR>
+Ten thousand cohorts on the wind's wild mane--<BR>
+No hand can check thy frost-steeds bursting forth<BR>
+To gambol madly on the storm-swept plain!<BR>
+Thy hissing snow-drifts wreathe their serpent train,<BR>
+With stormy laughter shrieks the joy of might--<BR>
+Or lifts, or falls, or wails upon the wane--<BR>
+Thy tempests sweep their stormy trail of white<BR>
+Across the deepening drifts--and man must die, or fight!<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Yes, man must sink or fight, be strong or die!<BR>
+That is thy law, O great, free, strenuous West!<BR>
+The weak thou wilt make strong till he defy<BR>
+Thy bufferings; but spacious prairie breast<BR>
+Will never nourish weakling as its guest!<BR>
+He must grow strong or die!  Thou givest all<BR>
+An equal chance--to work, to do their best--<BR>
+Free land, free hand--thy son must work or fall<BR>
+Grow strong or die!  That message shrieks the storm-wind's call!<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+And so I love thee, great, free, rugged land<BR>
+Of cloudless summer days, with west-wind croon,<BR>
+And prairie flowers all dewy-diademed,<BR>
+And twilights long, with blood-red, low-hung moon<BR>
+And mountain peaks that glisten white each noon<BR>
+Through purple haze that veils the western sky--<BR>
+And well I know the meadow-lark's far rune<BR>
+As up and down he lilts and circles high<BR>
+And sings sheer joy--be strong, be free; be strong or die!<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap00b"></A>
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+Foreword
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The question will at once occur why no mention is made of Marquette and
+Jolliet and La Salle in a work on the pathfinders of the West.  The
+simple answer is&mdash;they were <I>not</I> pathfinders.  Contrary to the notions
+imbibed at school, and repeated in all histories of the West,
+Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle did not discover the vast region
+beyond the Great Lakes.  Twelve years before these explorers had
+thought of visiting the land which the French hunter designated as the
+<I>Pays d'en Haut</I>, the West had already been discovered by the most
+intrepid <I>voyageurs</I> that France produced,&mdash;men whose wide-ranging
+explorations exceeded the achievements of Cartier and Champlain and La
+Salle put together.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It naturally rouses resentment to find that names revered for more than
+two centuries as the first explorers of the Great Northwest must give
+place to a name almost unknown.  It seems impossible that at this late
+date history should have to be rewritten.  Such is the fact <I>if we
+would have our history true</I>.  Not Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle
+discovered the West, but two poor adventurers, who sacrificed all
+earthly possessions to the enthusiasm for discovery, and incurred such
+bitter hostility from the governments of France and England that their
+names have been hounded to infamy.  These were Sieur Pierre Esprit
+Radisson and Sieur M�dard Chouart Groseillers, fur traders of Three
+Rivers, Quebec. [1]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The explanation of the long oblivion obscuring the fame of these two
+men is very simple.  Radisson and Groseillers defied, first New France,
+then Old France, and lastly England.  While on friendly terms with the
+church, they did not make their explorations subservient to the
+propagation of the faith.  In consequence, they were ignored by both
+Church and State.  The <I>Jesuit Relations</I> repeatedly refer to two young
+Frenchmen who went beyond Lake Michigan to a "Forked River" (the
+Mississippi), among the Sioux and other Indian tribes that used coal
+for fire because wood did not grow large enough on the prairie.
+Contemporaneous documents mention the exploits of the young Frenchmen.
+The State Papers of the Marine Department, Paris, contain numerous
+references to Radisson and Groseillers.  But, then, the <I>Jesuit
+Relations</I> were not accessible to scholars, let alone the general
+public, until the middle of the last century, when a limited edition
+was reprinted of the Cramoisy copies published at the time the priests
+sent their letters home to France.  The contemporaneous writings of
+Marie de l'Incarnation, the Abb� Belmont, and Dollier de Casson were
+not known outside the circle of French savants until still later; and
+it is only within recent years that the Archives of Paris have been
+searched for historical data.  Meantime, the historians of France and
+England, animated by the hostility of their respective governments,
+either slurred over the discoveries of Radisson and Groseillers
+entirely, or blackened their memories without the slightest regard to
+truth.  It would, in fact, take a large volume to contradict and
+disprove half the lies written of these two men.  Instead of consulting
+contemporaneous documents,&mdash;which would have entailed both cost and
+labor,&mdash;modern writers have, unfortunately, been satisfied to serve up
+a rehash of the detractions written by the old historians.  In 1885
+came a discovery that punished such slovenly methods by practically
+wiping out the work of the pseudo-historians.  There was found in the
+British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and Hudson's Bay House, London,
+unmistakably authentic record of Radisson's voyages, written by
+himself.  The Prince Society of Boston printed two hundred and fifty
+copies of the collected Journals.  The Canadian Archives published the
+journals of the two last voyages.  Francis Parkman was too
+conscientious to ignore the importance of the find; but his history of
+the West was already written.  He made what reparation he could to
+Radisson's memory by appending a footnote to subsequent editions of two
+of his books, stating that Radisson and Groseillers' travels took them
+to the "Forked River" before 1660.  Some ten other lines are all that
+Mr. Parkman relates of Radisson; and the data for these brief
+references have evidently been drawn from Radisson's enemies, for the
+explorer is called "a renegade."  It is necessary to state this,
+because some writers, whose zeal for criticism was much greater than
+their qualifications, wanted to know why any one should attempt to
+write Radisson's life when Parkman had already done so.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson's life reads more like a second Robinson Crusoe than sober
+history.  For that reason I have put the corroborative evidence in
+footnotes, rather than cumber the movement of the main theme.  I am
+sorry to have loaded the opening parts with so many notes; but
+Radisson's voyages change the relative positions of the other explorers
+so radically that proofs must be given.  The footnotes are for the
+student and may be omitted by the general reader.  The study of
+Radisson arose from, using his later exploits on Hudson Bay as the
+subject of the novel, <I>Heralds of Empire</I>.  On the publication of that
+book, several letters came from the Western states asking how far I
+thought Radisson had gone beyond Lake Superior before he went to Hudson
+Bay.  Having in mind&mdash;I am sorry to say&mdash;mainly the early records of
+Radisson's enemies, I at first answered that I thought it very
+difficult to identify the discoverer's itinerary beyond the Great
+Lakes.  So many letters continued to come on the subject that I began
+to investigate contemporaneous documents.  The path followed by the
+explorer west of the Great Lakes&mdash;as given by Radisson himself&mdash;is here
+written.  Full corroboration of all that Radisson relates is to be
+found&mdash;as already stated&mdash;in chronicles written at the period of his
+life and in the State Papers.  Copies of these I have in my possession.
+Samples of the papers bearing on Radisson's times, copied from the
+Marine Archives, will be found in the Appendix.  One must either accept
+the explorer's word as conclusive,&mdash;even when he relates his own
+trickery,&mdash;or in rejecting his journal also reject as fictions the
+<I>Jesuit Relations</I>, the <I>Marine Archives</I>, <I>Dollier de Casson</I>, <I>Marie
+de l'Incarnation</I>, and the <I>Abb� Belmont</I>, which record the same events
+as Radisson.  In no case has reliance been placed on second-hand
+chronicles.  Oldmixon and Charlevoix must both have written from
+hearsay; therefore, though quoted in the footnotes, they are not given
+as conclusive proof.  The only means of identifying Radisson's routes
+are (1) by his descriptions of the countries, (2) his notes of the
+Indian tribes; so that personal knowledge of the territory is
+absolutely essential in following Radisson's narrative.  All the
+regions traversed by Radisson&mdash;the Ottawa, the St. Lawrence, the Great
+Lakes, Labrador, and the Great Northwest&mdash;I have visited, some of them
+many times, except the shores of Hudson Bay, and of that region I have
+some hundreds of photographs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Material for the accounts of the other pathfinders of the West has been
+drawn directly from the different explorers' journals.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For historical matter I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. N. E.
+Dionne of the Parliamentary Library, Quebec, whose splendid sketch of
+Radisson and Groseillers, read before the Royal Society of Canada, does
+much to redeem the memory of the discoverers from ignominy; to Dr.
+George Bryce of Winnipeg, whose investigation of Hudson's Bay Archives
+adds a new chapter to Radisson's life; to Mr. Benjamin Sulte of Ottawa,
+whose destructive criticism of inaccuracies in old and modern records
+has done so much to stop people writing history out of their heads and
+to put research on an honest basis; and to M. Edouard Richard for
+scholarly advice relating to the Marine Archives, which he has
+exploited so thoroughly.  For transcripts and archives now out of
+print, thanks are due Mr. L. P. Sylvain of the Parliamentary Library,
+Ottawa, the officials of the Archives Department, Ottawa, Mr. F. C.
+Wurtele of Quebec, Professor Andrew Baird of Winnipeg, Mr. Alfred
+Matthews of the Prince Society, Boston, the Hon. Jacob V. Brower and
+Mr. Warren Upham of St. Paul.  Mr. Lawrence J. Burpee of Ottawa was so
+good as to give me a reading of his exhaustive notes on La V�rendrye
+and of data found on the Radisson family.  To Mrs. Fred Paget of
+Ottawa, the daughter of a Hudson's Bay Company officer, and to Mr. and
+Mrs. C. C. Farr of the Northern Ottawa, I am indebted for interesting
+facts on life in the fur posts.  Miss Talbot of Winnipeg obtained from
+retired officers of the Hudson's Bay Company a most complete set of
+photographs relating to the fur trade.  To her and to those officers
+who loaned old heirlooms to be photographed, I beg to express my
+cordial appreciation.  And the thanks of all who write on the North are
+permanently due Mr. C. C. Chipman, Chief Commissioner of the Hudson's
+Bay Company, for unfailing courtesy in extending information.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+WILDWOOD PLACE,
+<BR>
+WASSAIC, N.Y.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] I of course refer to the West as beyond the Great Lakes; for
+Nicotet, in 1634, and two nameless Frenchmen&mdash;servants of Jean de
+Lauzon&mdash;in 1654, had been beyond the Sault.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Just as this volume was going to the printer, I received a copy of the
+very valuable Minnesota <I>Memoir</I>, Vol. VI, compiled by the Hon. J. V.
+Brower of St. Paul, to whom my thanks are due for this excellent
+contribution to Western annals.  It may be said that the authors of
+this volume have done more than any other writers to vindicate Radisson
+and Groseillers as explorers of the West.  The very differences of
+opinion over the regions visited establish the fact that Radisson <I>did</I>
+explore parts of Minnesota.  I have purposely avoided trying to say
+<I>what</I> parts of Minnesota he exploited, because, it seems to me, the
+controversy is futile.  Radisson's memory has been the subject of
+controversy from the time of his life.  The controversy&mdash;first between
+the governments of France and England, subsequently between the French
+and English historians&mdash;has eclipsed the real achievements of Radisson.
+To me it seems non-essential as to whether Radisson camped on an island
+in the Mississippi, or only visited the region of that island.  The
+fact remains that he discovered the Great Northwest, meaning by that
+the region west of the Mississippi.  The same dispute has obscured his
+explorations of Hudson Bay, French writers maintaining that he went
+overland to the North and put his feet in the waters of the bay, the
+English writers insisting that he only crossed over the watershed
+toward Hudson Bay.  Again, the fact remains that he did what others had
+failed to do&mdash;discovered an overland route to the bay.  I am sorry that
+Radisson is accused in this <I>Memoir</I> of intentionally falsifying his
+relations in two respects, (1) in adding a fanciful year to the
+1658-1660 voyage; (2) in saying that he had voyaged down the
+Mississippi to Mexico.  (1) Internal evidence plainly shows that
+Radisson's first four voyages were written twenty years afterward, when
+he was in London, and not while on the voyage across the Atlantic with
+Cartwright, the Boston commissioner.  It is the most natural thing in
+the world that Radisson, who had so often been to the wilds, should
+have mixed his dates.  Every slip as to dates is so easily checked by
+contemporaneous records&mdash;which, themselves, need to be checked&mdash;that it
+seems too bad to accuse Radisson of wilfully lying in the matter.  When
+Radisson lied it was to avoid bloodshed, and not to exalt himself.  If
+he had had glorification of self in mind, he would not have set down
+his own faults so unblushingly; for instance, where he deceives M.
+Colbert of Paris.  (2) Radisson does not try to give the impression
+that he went to Mexico.  The sense of the context is that he met an
+Indian tribe&mdash;Illinois, Mandans, Omahas, or some other&mdash;who lived next
+to another tribe who told <I>of</I> the Spaniards.  I feel almost sure that
+the scholarly Mr. Benjamin Sulte is right in his letter to me when he
+suggests that Radisson's manuscript has been mixed by transposition of
+pages or paragraphs, rather than that Radisson himself was confused in
+his account.  At the same time every one of the contributors to the
+Minnesota <I>Memoir</I> deserves the thanks of all who love <I>true</I> history.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ADDENDUM
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Since the above foreword was written, the contents of this volume have
+appeared serially in four New York magazines.  The context of the book
+was slightly abridged in these articles, so that a very vital
+distinction&mdash;namely, the difference between what is given as in
+dispute, and what is given as incontrovertible fact&mdash;was lost; but what
+was my amusement to receive letters from all parts of the West all but
+challenging me to a duel.  One wants to know "how a reputable author
+dare" suggest that Radisson's voyages be taken as authentic.  There is
+no "dare" about it.  It is a fact.  For any "reputable" historian to
+suggest&mdash;as two recently have&mdash;that Radisson's voyages are a
+fabrication, is to stamp that historian as a pretender who has not
+investigated a single record contemporaneous with Radisson's life.  One
+cannot consult documents contemporaneous with his life and not learn
+instantly that he was a very live fact of the most troublesome kind the
+governments of France and England ever had to accept.  That is why it
+impresses me as a presumption that is almost comical for any modern
+writer to condescend to say that he "accepts" or "rejects" this or that
+part of Radisson's record.  If he "rejects" Radisson, he also rejects
+the <I>Marine Archives of Paris</I>, and the <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, which are
+the recognized sources of our early history.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Another correspondent furiously denounces Radisson as a liar because he
+mixes his dates of the 1660 trip.  It would be just as reasonable to
+call La Salle a liar because there are discrepancies in the dates of
+his exploits, as to call Radisson a liar for the slips in his dates.
+When the mistakes can be checked from internal evidence, one is hardly
+justified in charging falsification.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+A third correspondent is troubled by the reference to the Mascoutin
+Indians being <I>beyond</I> the Mississippi.  State documents establish this
+fact.  I am not responsible for it; and Radisson could not circle
+west-northwest from the Mascoutins to the great encampments of the
+Sioux without going far west of the Mississippi.  Even if the Jesuits
+make a slip in referring to the Sioux's use of some kind of coal for
+fire because there was no wood on the prairie, and really mean turf or
+buffalo refuse,&mdash;which I have seen the Sioux use for fire,&mdash;the fact is
+that only the tribes far west of the Mississippi habitually used such
+substitutes for wood.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+My Wisconsin correspondents I have offended by saying that Radisson
+went beyond the Wisconsin; my Minnesota friends, by saying that he went
+beyond Minnesota; and my Manitoba co-workers of past days, by
+suggesting that he ever went beyond Manitoba.  The fact remains that
+when we try to identify Radisson's voyages, we must take his own
+account of his journeyings; and that account establishes him as the
+Discoverer of the Northwest.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+For those who know, I surely do not need to state that there is no
+picture of Radisson extant, and that some of the studies of his life
+are just as genuine (?) as alleged old prints of his likeness.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap00c"></A>
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART ONE
+<BR><BR>
+PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO EXPLORE THE WEST, <BR>
+THE NORTHWEST, AND THE NORTH
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap01">
+CHAPTER I
+<BR>
+RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk
+Valley&mdash;In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
+escapes&mdash;He is overtaken in Sight of Home&mdash;Tortured and adopted in the
+Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him&mdash;His Escape
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap02">
+CHAPTER II
+<BR>
+RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the
+Iroquois Mission&mdash;He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the
+Thousand Islands&mdash;Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as
+Prisoners of War&mdash;Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap03">
+CHAPTER III
+<BR>
+RADISSON'S THIRD VOYAGE
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Discovery of the Great Northwest&mdash;Radisson and his Brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, visit what are now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and the
+Canadian Northwest&mdash;Radisson's Prophecy on first beholding the
+West&mdash;Twelve Years before Marquette and Jolliet, Radisson sees the
+Mississippi&mdash;The Terrible Remains of Dollard's Fight seen on the Way
+down the Ottawa&mdash;Why Radisson's Explorations have been ignored
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap04">
+CHAPTER IV
+<BR>
+RADISSON'S FOURTH VOYAGE
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Success of the Explorers arouses Envy&mdash;It becomes known that they
+have heard of the Famous Sea of the North&mdash;When they ask Permission to
+resume their Explorations, the French Governor refuses except on
+Condition of receiving Half the Profits&mdash;In Defiance, the Explorers
+steal off at Midnight&mdash;They return with a Fortune and are driven from
+New France
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap05">
+CHAPTER V
+<BR>
+RADISSON RENOUNCES ALLEGIANCE TO TWO CROWNS
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Rival Traders thwart the Plans of the Discoverers&mdash;Entangled in
+Lawsuits, the Two French Explorers go to England&mdash;The Organization of
+the Hudson's Bay Fur Company&mdash;Radisson the Storm-centre of
+International Intrigue&mdash;Boston Merchants in the Struggle to capture the
+Fur Trade
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap06">
+CHAPTER VI
+<BR>
+RADISSON GIVES UP A CAREER IN THE NAVY FOR THE FUR TRADE
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Though opposed by the Monopolists of Quebec, he secures Ships for a
+Voyage to Hudson Bay&mdash;Here he encounters a Pirate Ship from Boston and
+an English Ship of the Hudson's Bay Company&mdash;How he plays his Cards to
+win against Both Rivals
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap07">
+CHAPTER VII
+<BR>
+THE LAST VOYAGE OF RADISSON TO HUDSON BAY
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+France refuses to restore the Confiscated Furs and Radisson tries to
+redeem his Fortune&mdash;Re�ngaged by England, he captures back Fort Nelson,
+but comes to Want in his Old Age&mdash;His Character
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART TWO
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY OF
+THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, THE MISSOURI UPLANDS, AND THE VALLEY OF THE
+SASKATCHEWAN
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap08">
+CHAPTER VIII
+<BR>
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+M. de la V�rendrye continues the Exploration of the Great Northwest by
+establishing a Chain of Fur Posts across the Continent&mdash;Privations of
+the Explorers and the Massacre of Twenty Followers&mdash;His Sons visit the
+Mandans and discover the Rockies&mdash;The Valley of the Saskatchewan is
+next explored, but Jealousy thwarts the Explorer, and he dies in Poverty
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART THREE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE LEADS SAMUEL HEARNE TO THE ARCTIC
+CIRCLE AND ATHABASCA REGION
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap09">
+CHAPTER IX
+<BR>
+SAMUEL HEARNE
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Adventures of Hearne in his Search for the Coppermine River and
+Northwest Passage&mdash;Hilarious Life of Wassail led by Governor
+Norton&mdash;The Massacre of the Eskimo by Hearne's Indians North of the
+Arctic Circle&mdash;Discovery of the Athabasca Country&mdash;Hearne becomes
+Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but is captured by the
+French&mdash;Death of Norton and Suicide of Matonabbee
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART FOUR
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES&mdash;HOW MACKENZIE CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES
+AND LEWIS AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap10">
+CHAPTER X
+<BR>
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed
+across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the Question of a
+Northwest Passage
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap11">
+CHAPTER XI
+<BR>
+LEWIS AND CLARK
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend
+the Columbia to the Pacific&mdash;Exciting Adventures on the Ca�ons of the
+Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone&mdash;Lewis'
+Escape from Hostiles
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap12">
+APPENDIX
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap13">
+INDEX
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-front">
+Stealing from the Fort by Night&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. _Frontispiece_
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-002">
+Map of the Great Fur Country
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-005">
+Three Rivers in 1757
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-014">
+Map of the Iroquois Country in the Days of Radisson
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-032">
+Albany from an Old Print
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-037">
+The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-041">
+Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in Holland
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-043">
+One of the Earliest Maps of the Great Lakes
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-050">
+Paddling past Hostiles
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-056">
+Jogues, the Jesuit Missionary, who was tortured by the Mohawks
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-061">
+Ch�teau de Ramezay, Montreal
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-070">
+A Cree Brave, with the Wampum String
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-081">
+An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-083">
+Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in Montreal
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-095">
+Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-101">
+Montreal in 1760
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-108">
+Ch�teau St. Louis, Quebec, 1669
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-120">
+A Parley on the Plains
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-134">
+Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three Rivers
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-151">
+Skin for Skin, Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay Company
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-163">
+Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from
+  Tea-chests at York Factory
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-187">
+Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower
+  Fort Garry, Red River
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-194">
+Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-196">
+Fights at the Foothills of the Rockies, between Crows and Snakes
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-199">
+Each Man landed with Pack on his Back and trotted away over Portages
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-200">
+A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-207">
+A Group of Cree Indians
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-212">
+The Soldiers marched out from Mount Royal for the Western Sea
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-217">
+Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca River
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-220">
+The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-223">
+Hungry Hall, 1870
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-228">
+A Monarch of the Plains
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-231">
+Fur Traders towed down the Saskatchewan in the Summer of 1900
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-236">
+Tepees dotted the Valley
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-242">
+An Eskimo Belle
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-248">
+Samuel Hearne
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-250">
+Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-258">
+Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-262">
+Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-266">
+Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's drawing, 1733-1747
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-270">
+Fort Prince of Wales
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-271">
+Beaver Coin of the Hudson's Bay Company
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-276">
+Alexander Mackenzie
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-278">
+Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for the
+  Value of Three Beaver Skins
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-281">
+Quill and Beadwork on Buckskin
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-283">
+Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-286">
+Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-290">
+Slave Lake Indians
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-301">
+Good Hope, Mackenzie River, Hudson's Bay Company Fort
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-306">
+The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight Sun
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-309">
+Captain Meriwether Lewis
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-310">
+Captain William Clark
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-314">
+Tracking up Stream
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-316">
+Typical Mountain Trapper
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-317">
+The Discovery of the Great Falls
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-319">
+Fighting a Grizzly
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-320">
+Packer carrying Goods across Portage
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-322">
+Spying on Enemy's Fort
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-324">
+Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-328">
+On Guard
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-330">
+Indians of the Up-country or Pays d'en Haut
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+PART I
+</H2>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON
+</H3>
+
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO
+EXPLORE THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST,
+AND THE NORTH
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-002"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-002.jpg" ALT="Map of the Great Fur Company." BORDER="2" WIDTH="635" HEIGHT="406">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Map of the Great Fur Company.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+Pathfinders of the West
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER I
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1651-1653
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk
+Valley&mdash;In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
+escapes&mdash;He is overtaken in Sight of Home&mdash;Tortured and adopted in the
+Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him&mdash;His Escape
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Early one morning in the spring of 1652 three young men left the little
+stockaded fort of Three Rivers, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence,
+for a day's hunting in the marshes of Lake St. Peter.  On one side were
+the forested hills, purple with the mists of rising vapor and still
+streaked with white patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the
+sunlight.  On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence,
+more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of
+rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese
+flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just
+as they do to-day.  Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice
+poured their spring flood into the St. Lawrence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The hunters were very young.  Only hunters rash with the courage of
+untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all
+the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the
+little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year.
+Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three
+Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois.
+The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had
+been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in
+the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France.  It was from
+Three Rivers that Piescaret, the famous Algonquin chief who could
+outrun a deer, had set out against the Iroquois, turning his snowshoes
+back to front, so that the track seemed to lead north when he was
+really going south, and then, having thrown his pursuers off the trail,
+coming back on his own footsteps, slipping up stealthily on the
+Iroquois that were following the false scent, and tomahawking the
+laggards.[1]  It was from Three Rivers that the Mohawks had captured
+the Algonquin girl who escaped by slipping off the thongs that bound
+her.  Stepping over the prostrate forms of her sleeping guards, such a
+fury of revenge possessed her that she seized an axe and brained the
+nearest sleeper, then eluded her pursuers by first hiding in a hollow
+tree and afterward diving under the debris of a beaver dam.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-005"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-005.jpg" ALT="Three Rivers in 1757." BORDER="2" WIDTH="377" HEIGHT="285">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Three Rivers in 1757.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+These things were known to every inhabitant of Three Rivers.  Farmers
+had flocked into the little fort and could venture back to their fields
+only when armed with a musket.[2]  Yet the three young hunters rashly
+left the shelter of the fort walls and took the very dangerous path
+that led between the forests and the water.  One of the young men was
+barely in his seventeenth year.[3]  This was Pierre Esprit Radisson,
+from St. Malo, the town of the famous Cartier.  Young Radisson had only
+come to New France the year before, and therefore could not realize the
+dangers of Indian warfare.  Like boys the world over, the three went
+along, boasting how they would fight if the Indians came.  One skirted
+the forest, on the watch for Iroquois, the others kept to the water, on
+the lookout for game.  About a mile from Three Rivers they encountered
+a herdsman who warned them to keep out from the foot of the hills.
+Things that looked like a multitude of heads had risen out of the earth
+back there, he said, pointing to the forests.  That set the young
+hunters loading their pistols and priming muskets.  It must also have
+chilled their zest; for, shooting some ducks, one of the young men
+presently declared that he had had enough&mdash;he was going back.  With
+that daring which was to prove both the lodestar and the curse of his
+life, young Radisson laughed to scorn the sudden change of mind.
+Thereupon the first hunter was joined by the second, and the two went
+off in high dudgeon.  With a laugh, Pierre Radisson marched along
+alone, foreshadowing his after life,&mdash;a type of every pathfinder facing
+the dangers of the unknown with dauntless scorn, an immortal type of
+the world-hero.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shooting at every pace and hilarious over his luck, Radisson had
+wandered some nine miles from the fort, when he came to a stream too
+deep to ford and realized that he already had more game than he could
+possibly carry.  Hiding in hollow trees what he could not bring back,
+he began trudging toward Three Rivers with a string of geese, ducks,
+and odd teal over his shoulders, Wading swollen brooks and scrambling
+over windfalls, he retraced his way without pause till he caught sight
+of the town chapel glimmering in the sunlight against the darkening
+horizon above the river.  He was almost back where his comrades had
+left him; so he sat down to rest.  The cowherd had driven his cattle
+back to Three Rivers.[4]  The river came lapping through the rushes.
+There was a clacking of wild-fowl flocking down to their marsh nests;
+perhaps a crane flopped through the reeds; but Radisson, who had
+laughed the nervous fears of the others to scorn, suddenly gave a start
+at the lonely sounds of twilight.  Then he noticed that his pistols
+were water-soaked.  Emptying the charges, he at once reloaded, and with
+characteristic daring crept softly back to reconnoitre the woods.
+Dodging from tree to tree, he peered up and down the river.  Great
+flocks of ducks were swimming on the water.  That reassured him, for
+the bird is more alert to alarm than man.  The fort was almost within
+call.  Radisson determined to have a shot at such easy quarry; but as
+he crept through the grass toward the game, he almost stumbled over
+what rooted him to the spot with horror.  Just as they had fallen,
+naked and scalped, with bullet and hatchet wounds all over their
+bodies, lay his comrades of the morning, dead among the rushes.
+Radisson was too far out to get back to the woods.  Stooping, he tried
+to grope to the hiding of the rushes.  As he bent, half a hundred heads
+rose from the grasses, peering which way he might go.  They were
+behind, before, on all sides&mdash;his only hope was a dash for the
+cane-grown river, where he might hide by diving and wading, till
+darkness gave a chance for a rush to the fort.  Slipping bullet and
+shot in his musket as he ran, and ramming down the paper, hoping
+against hope that he had not been seen, he dashed through the
+brushwood.  A score of guns crashed from the forest.[5]  Before he
+realized the penalty that the Iroquois might exact for such an act, he
+had fired back; but they were upon him.  He was thrown down and
+disarmed.  When he came giddily to his senses, he found himself being
+dragged back to the woods, where the Iroquois flaunted the fresh scalps
+of his dead friends.  Half drawn, half driven, he was taken to the
+shore.  Here, a flotilla of canoes lay concealed where he had been
+hunting wild-fowl but a few hours before.  Fires were kindled, and the
+crotched sticks driven in the ground to boil the kettle for the evening
+meal.  The young Frenchman was searched, stripped, and tied round the
+waist with a rope, the Indians yelling and howling like so many wolves
+all the while till a pause was given their jubilation by the alarm of a
+scout that the French and Algonquins were coming.  In a trice, the fire
+was out and covered.  A score of young braves set off to reconnoitre.
+Fifty remained at the boats; but if Radisson hoped for a rescue, he was
+doomed to disappointment.  The warriors returned.  Seventy Iroquois
+gathered round a second fire for the night.  The one predominating
+passion of the savage nature is bravery.  Lying in ambush, they had
+heard this French youth laugh at his comrades' fears.  In defiance of
+danger, they had seen him go hunting alone.  After he had heard an
+alarm, he had daringly come out to shoot at the ducks.  And, then, boy
+as he was, when attacked he had instantly fired back at numerous enough
+enemies to have intimidated a score of grown men.  There is not the
+slightest doubt it was Radisson's bravery that now saved him from the
+fate of his companions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His clothes were returned.  While the evening meal was boiling, young
+warriors dressed and combed the Frenchman's hair after the manner of
+braves.  They daubed his cheeks with war-paint; and when they saw that
+their rancid meats turned him faint, they boiled meat in clean water
+and gave him meal browned on burning sand.[6]  He did not struggle to
+escape, so he was now untied.  That night he slept between two warriors
+under a common blanket, through which he counted the stars.  For fifty
+years his home was to be under the stars.  It is typically Radisson
+when he could add: "I slept a sound sleep; for they wakened me upon the
+breaking of the day."  In the morning they embarked in thirty-seven
+canoes, two Indians in each boat, with Radisson tied to the cross-bar
+of one, the scalps lying at his feet.  Spreading out on the river, they
+beat their paddles on the gunwales of the canoes, shot off guns, and
+uttered the shrill war-cry&mdash;"Ah-oh!  Ah-oh!  Ah-oh!" [7]  Lest this
+were not sufficient defiance to the penned-up fort on the river bank,
+the chief stood up in his canoe, signalled silence, and gave three
+shouts.  At once the whole company answered till the hills rang; and
+out swung the fleet of canoes with more shouting and singing and firing
+of guns, each paddle-stroke sounding the death knell to the young
+Frenchman's hopes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By sunset they were among the islands at the mouth of the Richelieu,
+where muskrats scuttled through the rushes and wild-fowl clouded the
+air.  The south shore of Lake St. Peter was heavily forested; the
+north, shallow.  The lake was flooded with spring thaw, and the Mohawks
+could scarcely find camping-ground among the islands.  The young
+prisoner was deathly sick from the rank food that he had eaten and
+heart-sick from the widening distance between himself and Three Rivers.
+Still, they treated him kindly, saying, "Chagon!  Chagon!&mdash;Be merry!
+Cheer up!"  The fourth day up the Richelieu, he was embarked without
+being fastened to the cross-bar, and he was given a paddle.  Fresh to
+the work, Radisson made a labor of his oar.  The Iroquois took the
+paddle and taught him how to give the light, deft, feather strokes of
+the Indian canoeman.  On the river they met another band of warriors,
+and the prisoner was compelled to show himself a trophy of victory and
+to sing songs for his captors.  That evening the united bands kindled
+an enormous campfire and with the scalps of the dead flaunting from
+spear heads danced the scalp dance, re�nacting in pantomime all the
+episodes of the massacre to the monotonous chant-chant, of a recitative
+relating the foray.  At the next camping-ground, Radisson's hair was
+shaved in front and decorated on top with the war-crest of a brave.
+Having translated the white man into a savage, they brought him one of
+the tin looking-glasses used by Indians to signal in the sun.  "I,
+viewing myself all in a pickle," relates Radisson, "smeared with red
+and black, covered with such a top,&nbsp;&#8230; could not but fall in love
+with myself, if I had not had better instructions to shun the sin of
+pride."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson saw that apparent compliance with the Mohawks might win him a
+chance to escape; so he was the first to arise in the morning, wakening
+the others and urging them that it was time to break camp.  The stolid
+Indians were not to be moved by an audacious white boy.  Watching the
+young prisoner, the keepers lay still, feigning sleep.  Radisson rose.
+They made no protest.  He wandered casually down to the water side.
+One can guess that the half-closed eyelids of his guards opened a
+trifle: was the mouse trying to get away from the cat?  To the Indians'
+amusement, instead of trying to escape, Radisson picked up a spear and
+practised tossing it, till a Mohawk became so interested that he jumped
+up and taught the young Frenchman the proper throws.  That day the
+Indians gave him the present of a hunting-knife.  North of Lake
+Champlain, the river became so turbulent that they were forced to land
+and make a <I>portage</I>.  Instead of lagging, as captives frequently did
+from very fear as they approached nearer and nearer what was almost
+certain to mean death-torture in the Iroquois villages&mdash;Radisson
+hurried over the rocks, helping the older warriors to carry their
+packs.  At night he was the first to cut wood for the camp fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+About a week from the time they had left Lake St. Peter, they entered
+Lake Champlain.  On the shores of the former had been enacted the most
+hideous of all Indian customs&mdash;the scalp dance.  On the shores of the
+latter was performed one of the most redeeming rites of Indian warfare.
+Round a small pool of water a coppice of branches was interlaced.  Into
+the water were thrown hot stones till the enclosure was steaming.  Here
+each warrior took a sweat-bath of purification to prepare for reunion
+with his family.  Invoking the spirits as they bathed, the warriors
+emerged washed&mdash;as they thought&mdash;of all blood-guilt.[8]
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-014"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-014.jpg" ALT="Map of the Iroquois country in the days of Radisson." BORDER="2" WIDTH="384" HEIGHT="338">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Map of the Iroquois country in the days of Radisson.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+In the night shots sounded through the heavy silence of the forest, and
+the Mohawks embarked in alarm, compelling their white prisoner to lie
+flat in the bottom of the canoe.  In the morning when he awakened, he
+found the entire band hidden among the rushes of the lake.  They spent
+several days on Lake Champlain, then glided past wooded mountains down
+a calm river to Lake George, where canoes were abandoned and the
+warriors struck westward through dense forests to the country of the
+Iroquois.  Two days from the lake slave women met the returning braves,
+and in Radisson's words, "loaded themselves like mules with baggage."
+On this woodland march Radisson won golden opinions for himself by two
+acts: struck by an insolent young brave, he thrashed the culprit
+soundly; seeing an old man staggering under too heavy a load, the white
+youth took the burden on his own shoulders.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The return of the warriors to their villages was always celebrated as a
+triumph.  The tribe marched out to meet them, singing, firing guns,
+shouting a welcome, dancing as the Israelites danced of old when
+victors returned from battle.  Men, women, and children lined up on
+each side armed with clubs and whips to scourge the captives.  Well for
+Radisson that he had won the warriors' favor; for when the time came
+for him to run the gantlet of Iroquois <I>diableries</I>, instead of being
+slowly led, with trussed arms and shackled feet, he was stripped free
+and signalled to run so fast that his tormentors could not hit him.
+Shrieks of laughter from the women, shouts of applause from the men,
+always greeted the racer who reached the end of the line unscathed.  A
+captive Huron woman, who had been adopted by the tribe, caught the
+white boy as he dashed free of a single blow clear through the lines of
+tormentors.  Leading him to her cabin, she fed and clothed him.
+Presently a band of braves marched up, demanded the surrender of
+Radisson, and took him to the Council Lodge of the Iroquois for
+judgment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Old men sat solemnly round a central fire, smoking their calumets in
+silence.  Radisson was ordered to sit down.  A coal of fire was put in
+the bowl of the great Council Pipe and passed reverently round the
+assemblage.  Then the old Huron woman entered, gesticulating and
+pleading for the youth's life.  The men smoked on silently with deep,
+guttural "ho-ho's," meaning "yes, yes, we are pleased."  The woman was
+granted permission to adopt Radisson as a son.  Radisson had won his
+end.  Diplomacy and courage had saved his life.  It now remained to
+await an opportunity for escape.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson bent all his energies to become a great hunter.  He was given
+firearms, and daily hunted with the family of his adoption.  It so
+happened that the family had lost a son in the wars, whose name had
+signified the same as Radisson's&mdash;that is, "a stone"; so the Pierre of
+Three Rivers became the Orimha of the Mohawks.  The Iroquois husband of
+the woman who had befriended him gave such a feast to the Mohawk braves
+as befitted the prestige of a warrior who had slain nineteen enemies
+with his own hand.  Three hundred young Mohawks sat down to a collation
+of moose nose and beaver tails and bears' paws, served by slaves.  To
+this banquet Radisson was led, decked out in colored blankets with
+garnished leggings and such a wealth of wampum strings hanging from
+wrists, neck, hair, and waist that he could scarcely walk.  Wampum
+means more to the Indian than money to the white man.  It represents
+not only wealth but social standing, and its value may be compared to
+the white man's estimate of pink pearls.  Diamond-cutters seldom spend
+more than two weeks in polishing a good stone.  An Indian would spend
+thirty days in perfecting a single bit of shell into fine wampum.
+Radisson's friends had ornamented him for the feast in order to win the
+respect of the Mohawks for the French boy.  Striking his hatchet
+through a kettle of sagamite to signify thus would he break peace to
+all Radisson's foes, the old Iroquois warrior made a speech to the
+assembled guests.  The guests clapped their hands and shouted, "Chagon,
+Orimha!&mdash;Be merry, Pierre!"  The Frenchman had been formally adopted as
+a Mohawk.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The forests were now painted in all the glories of autumn.  All the
+creatures of the woodlands shook off the drowsy laziness of summer and
+came down from the uplands seeking haunts for winter retreat.  Moose
+and deer were on the move.  Beaver came splashing down-stream to
+plaster up their wattled homes before frost.  Bear and lynx and marten,
+all were restless as the autumn winds instinct with coming storm.  This
+is the season when the Indian sets out to hunt and fight.  Furnished
+with clothing, food, and firearms, Radisson left the Mohawk Valley with
+three hunters.  By the middle of August, the rind of the birch is in
+perfect condition for peeling.  The first thing the hunters did was to
+slit off the bark of a thick-girthed birch and with cedar linings make
+themselves a skiff.  Then they prepared to lay up a store of meat for
+the winter's war-raids.  Before ice forms a skim across the still
+pools, nibbled chips betray where a beaver colony is at work; so the
+hunters began setting beaver traps.  One night as they were returning
+to their wigwam, there came through the leafy darkness the weird sound
+of a man singing.  It was a solitary Algonquin captive, who called out
+that he had been on the track of a bear since daybreak.  He probably
+belonged to some well-known Iroquois, for he was welcomed to the
+camp-fire.  The sight of a face from Three Rivers roused the
+Algonquin's memories of his northern home.  In the noise of the
+crackling fire, he succeeded in telling Radisson, without being
+overheard by the Iroquois, that he had been a captive for two years and
+longed to escape.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you love the French?" the Algonquin asked Radisson.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you love the Algonquin?" returned Radisson, knowing they were
+watched.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"As I do my own nation."  Then leaning across to Radisson,
+"Brother&mdash;white man!&mdash;Let us escape!  The Three Rivers&mdash;it is not far
+off!  Will you live like a Huron in bondage, or have your liberty with
+the French?"  Then, lowering his voice, "Let us kill all three this
+night when they are asleep!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From such a way of escape, the French youth held back.  The Algonquin
+continued to urge him.  By this time, Radisson must have heard from
+returning Iroquois warriors that they had slain the governor of Three
+Rivers, Duplessis-Kerbodot, and eleven other Frenchmen, among whom was
+the husband of Radisson's eldest sister, Marguerite.[9]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While Radisson was still hesitating, the suspicious Iroquois demanded
+what so much whispering was about; but the alert Algonquin promptly
+quieted their fears by trumping up some hunting story.  Wearied from
+their day's hunt, the three Mohawks slept heavily round the camp-fire.
+They had not the least suspicion of danger, for they had stacked their
+arms carelessly against the trees of the forest.  Terrified lest the
+Algonquin should attempt to carry out his threat, Radisson pretended to
+be asleep.  Rising noiselessly, the Algonquin sat down by the fire.
+The Mohawks slept on.  The Algonquin gave Radisson a push.  The French
+boy looked up to see the Algonquin studying the postures of the
+sleeping forms.  The dying fire glimmered like a blotch of blood under
+the trees.  Stepping stealthy as a cat over the sleeping men, the
+Indian took possession of their firearms.  Drawn by a kind of horror,
+Radisson had risen.  The Algonquin thrust one of the tomahawks into the
+French lad's hands and pointed without a word at the three sleeping
+Mohawks.  Then the Indian began the black work.  The Mohawk nearest the
+fire never knew that he had been struck, and died without a sound.
+Radisson tried to imitate the relentless Algonquin, but, unnerved with
+horror, he bungled the blow and lost hold of the hatchet just as it
+struck the Mohawk's head.  The Iroquois sprang up with a shout that
+awakened the third man, but the Algonquin was ready.  Radisson's blow
+proved fatal.  The victim reeled back dead, and the third man was
+already despatched by the Algonquin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson was free.  It was a black deed that freed him, but not half so
+black as the deeds perpetrated in civilized wars for less cause; and
+for that deed Radisson was to pay swift retribution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Taking the scalps as trophies to attest his word, the Algonquin threw
+the bodies into the river.  He seized all the belongings of the dead
+men but one gun and then launched out with Radisson on the river.  The
+French youth was conscience-stricken.  "I was sorry to have been in
+such an encounter," he writes, "but it was too late to repent."  Under
+cover of the night mist and shore foliage, they slipped away with the
+current.  At first dawn streak, while the mist still hid them, they
+landed, carried their canoe to a sequestered spot in the dense forest,
+and lay hidden under the upturned skiff all that day, tormented by
+swarms of mosquitoes and flies, but not daring to move from
+concealment.  At nightfall, they again launched down-stream, keeping
+always in the shadows of the shore till mist and darkness shrouded
+them, then sheering off for mid-current, where they paddled for dear
+life.  Where camp-fires glimmered on the banks, they glided past with
+motionless paddles.  Across Lake Champlain, across the Richelieu, over
+long <I>portages</I> where every shadow took the shape of an ambushed
+Iroquois, for fourteen nights they travelled, when at last with many
+windings and false alarms they swept out on the wide surface of Lake
+St. Peter in the St. Lawrence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Within a day's journey of Three Rivers, they were really in greater
+danger than they had been in the forests of Lake Champlain.  Iroquois
+had infested that part of the St. Lawrence for more than a year.  The
+forest of the south shore, the rush-grown marshes, the wooded islands,
+all afforded impenetrable hiding.  It was four in the morning when they
+reached Lake St. Peter.  Concealing their canoe, they withdrew to the
+woods, cooked their breakfast, covered the fire, and lay down to sleep.
+In a couple of hours the Algonquin impatiently wakened Radisson and
+urged him to cross the lake to the north shore on the Three Rivers
+side.  Radisson warned the Indian that the Iroquois were ever lurking
+about Three Rivers.  The Indian would not wait till sunset.  "Let us
+go," he said.  "We are past fear.  Let us shake off the yoke of these
+whelps that have killed so many French and black robes (priests).&#8230;
+If you come not now that we are so near, I leave you, and will tell the
+governor you were afraid to come."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson's judgment was overruled by the impatient Indian.  They pushed
+their skiff out from the rushes.  The water lay calm as a sea of
+silver.  They paddled directly across to get into hiding on the north
+shore.  Halfway across Radisson, who was at the bow, called out that he
+saw shadows on the water ahead.  The Indian stood up and declared that
+the shadow was the reflection of a flying bird.  Barely had they gone a
+boat length when the shadows multiplied.  They were the reflections of
+Iroquois ambushed among the rushes.  Heading the canoe back for the
+south shore, they raced for their lives.  The Iroquois pursued in their
+own boats.  About a mile from the shore, the strength of the fugitives
+fagged.  Knowing that the Iroquois were gaining fast, Radisson threw
+out the loathsome scalps that the Algonquin had persisted in carrying.
+By that strange fatality which seems to follow crime, instead of
+sinking, the hairy scalps floated on the surface of the water back to
+the pursuing Iroquois.  Shouts of rage broke from the warriors.
+Radisson's skiff was so near the south shore that he could see the
+pebbled bottom of the lake; but the water was too deep to wade and too
+clear for a dive, and there was no driftwood to afford hiding.  Then a
+crash of musketry from the Iroquois knocked the bottom out of the
+canoe.  The Algonquin fell dead with two bullet wounds in his head and
+the canoe gradually filled, settled, and sank, with the young Frenchman
+clinging to the cross-bar mute as stone.  Just as it disappeared under
+water, Radisson was seized, and the dead Algonquin was thrown into the
+Mohawk boats.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson alone remained to pay the penalty of a double crime; and he
+might well have prayed for the boat to sink.  The victors shouted their
+triumph.  Hurrying ashore, they kindled a great fire.  They tore the
+heart from the dead Algonquin, transfixed the head on a pike, and cast
+the mutilated body into the flames for those cannibal rites in which
+savages thought they gained courage by eating the flesh of their
+enemies.  Radisson was rifled of clothes and arms, trussed at the
+elbows, roped round the waist, and driven with blows back to the
+canoes.  There were other captives among the Mohawks.  As the canoes
+emerged from the islands, Radisson counted one hundred and fifty
+Iroquois warriors, with two French captives, one white woman, and
+seventeen Hurons.  Flaunting from the canoe prows were the scalps of
+eleven Algonquins.  The victors fired off their muskets and shouted
+defiance until the valley rang.  As the seventy-five canoes turned up
+the Richelieu River for the country of the Iroquois, hope died in the
+captive Hurons and there mingled with the chant of the Mohawks'
+war-songs, the low monotonous dirge of the prisoners:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"If I die, I die valiant!<BR>
+I go without fear<BR>
+To that land where brave men<BR>
+Have gone long before me--<BR>
+If I die, I die valiant."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Twelve miles up the Richelieu, the Iroquois landed to camp.  The
+prisoners were pegged out on the sand, elbows trussed to knees, each
+captive tied to a post.  In this fashion they lay every night of
+encampment, tortured by sand-flies that they were powerless to drive
+off.  At the entrance to the Mohawk village, a yoke was fastened to the
+captives' necks by placing pairs of saplings one on each side down the
+line of prisoners.  By the rope round the waist of the foremost
+prisoner, they were led slowly between the lines of tormentors.  The
+captives were ordered to sing.  If one refused or showed fear, a Mohawk
+struck off a finger with a hatchet, or tore the prisoners' nails out,
+or thrust red-hot irons into the muscles of the bound arms.[10]  As
+Radisson appeared, he was recognized with shouts of rage by the friends
+of the murdered Mohawks.  Men, women, and children armed with rods and
+skull-crackers&mdash;leather bags loaded with stones&mdash;rushed on the slowly
+moving file of prisoners.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They began to cry from both sides," says Radisson; "we marching one
+after another, environed with people to witness that hideous sight,
+which seriously may be called the image of Hell in this world."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The prisoners moved mournfully on.  The Hurons chanted their death
+dirge.  The Mohawk women uttered screams of mockery.  Suddenly there
+broke from the throng of onlookers the Iroquois family that had adopted
+Radisson.  Pushing through the crew of torturers, the mother caught
+Radisson by the hair, calling him by the name of her dead son, "Orimha!
+Orimha!"  She cut the thongs that bound him to the poles, and wresting
+him free shoved him to her husband, who led Radisson to their own lodge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thou fool," cried the old chief, "thou wast my son!  Thou makest
+thyself an enemy!  Thou lovest us not, though we saved thy life!
+Wouldst kill me, too?"  Then, with a rough push to a mat on the ground,
+"Chagon&mdash;now, be merry!  It's a merry business you've got into!  Give
+him something to eat!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Trembling with fear, young Radisson put as bold a face on as he could
+and made a show of eating what the squaw placed before him.  He was
+still relating his adventures when there came a roar of anger from the
+Mohawks outside, who had discovered his absence from the line.  A
+moment later the rabble broke into the lodge.  Jostling the friendly
+chief aside, the Mohawk warriors carried Radisson back to the orgies of
+the torture.  The prisoners had been taken out of the stocks and placed
+on several scaffoldings.  One poor Frenchman fell to the ground bruised
+and unable to rise.  The Iroquois tore the scalp from his head and
+threw him into the fire.  That was Radisson's first glimpse of what was
+in store for him.  Then he, too, stood on the scaffolding among the
+other prisoners, who never ceased singing their death song.  In the
+midst of these horrors&mdash;<I>diableries</I>, the Jesuits called them&mdash;as if
+the very elements had been moved with pity, there burst over the
+darkened forest a terrific hurricane of hail and rain.  This put out
+the fires and drove all the tormentors away but a few impish children,
+who stayed to pluck nails from the hands and feet of the captives and
+shoot arrows with barbed points at the naked bodies.  Every iniquity
+that cruelty could invent, these children practised on the captives.
+Red-hot spears were brought from the lodge fires and thrust into the
+prisoners.  The mutilated finger ends were ground between stones.
+Thongs were twisted round wrists and ankles, by sticks put through a
+loop, till flesh was cut to the bone.  As the rain ceased falling, a
+woman, who was probably the wife of one of the murdered Mohawks,
+brought her little boy to cut one of Radisson's fingers with a flint
+stone.  The child was too young and ran away from the gruesome task.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gathering darkness fell over the horrible spectacle.  The exhausted
+captives, some in a delirium from pain, others unconscious, were led to
+separate lodges, or dragged over the ground, and left tied for the
+night.  The next morning all were returned to the scaffolds, but the
+first day had glutted the Iroquois appetite for tortures.  The friendly
+family was permitted to approach Radisson.  The mother brought him food
+and told him that the Council Lodge had decided not to kill him for
+that day&mdash;they wanted the young white warrior for their own ranks; but
+even as the cheering hope was uttered, came a brave with a pipe of live
+coals, in which he thrust and held Radisson's thumb.  No sooner had the
+tormentor left than the woman bound up the burn and oiled Radisson's
+wounds.  He suffered no abuse that day till night, when the soles of
+both feet were burned.  The majority of the captives were flung into a
+great bonfire.  On the third day of torture he almost lost his life.
+First came a child to gnaw at his fingers.  Then a man appeared armed
+for the ghastly work of mutilation.  Both these the Iroquois father of
+Radisson sent away.  Once, when none of the friendly family happened to
+be near, Radisson was seized and bound for burning, but by chance the
+lighted faggot scorched his executioner.  A friendly hand slashed the
+thongs that bound him, and he was drawn back to the scaffold.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Past caring whether he lived or died, and in too great agony from the
+burns of his feet to realize where he was going, Radisson was conducted
+to the Great Council.  Sixty old men sat on a circle of mats, smoking,
+round the central fire.  Before them stood seven other captives.
+Radisson only was still bound.  A gust of wind from the opening lodge
+door cleared the smoke for an instant and there entered Radisson's
+Indian father, clad in the regalia of a mighty chief.  Tomahawk and
+calumet and medicine-bag were in his hands.  He took his place in the
+circle of councillors.  Judgment was to be given on the remaining
+prisoners.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After passing the Council Pipe from hand to hand in solemn silence, the
+sachems prepared to give their views.  One arose, and offering the
+smoke of incense to the four winds of heaven to invoke witness to the
+justice of the trial, gave his opinion on the matter of life or death.
+Each of the chiefs in succession spoke.  Without any warning whatever,
+one chief rose and summarily tomahawked three of the captives.  That
+had been the sentence.  The rest were driven, like sheep for the
+shambles, to life-long slavery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson was left last.  His case was important.  He had sanctioned the
+murder of three Mohawks.  Not for a moment since he was recaptured had
+they dared to untie the hands of so dangerous a prisoner.  Amid deathly
+silence, the Iroquois father stood up.  Flinging down medicine-bag, fur
+robe, wampum belts, and tomahawk, he pointed to the nineteen scars upon
+his side, each of which signified an enemy slain by his own hand.  Then
+the old Mohawk broke into one of those impassioned rhapsodies of
+eloquence which delighted the savage nature, calling back to each of
+the warriors recollection of victories for the Iroquois.  His eyes took
+fire from memory of heroic battle.  The councillors shook off their
+imperturbable gravity and shouted "Ho, ho!"  Each man of them had a
+memory of his part in those past glories.  And as they applauded, there
+glided into the wigwam the mother, singing some battle-song of valor,
+dancing and gesticulating round and round the lodge in dizzy,
+serpentine circlings, that illustrated in pantomime those battles of
+long ago.  Gliding ghostily from the camp-fire to the outer dark, she
+suddenly stopped, stood erect, advanced a step, and with all her might
+threw one belt of priceless wampum at the councillors' feet, one
+necklace over the prisoner's head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before the applause could cease or the councillors' ardor cool, the
+adopted brother sprang up, hatchet in hand, and sang of other
+victories.  Then, with a delicacy of etiquette which white pleaders do
+not always observe, father and son withdrew from the Council Lodge to
+let the jury deliberate.  The old sachems were disturbed.  They had
+been moved more than their wont.  Twenty withdrew to confer.  Dusk
+gathered deeper and deeper over the forests of the Mohawk Valley.
+Tawny faces came peering at the doors, waiting for the decision.
+Outsiders tore the skins from the walls of the lodge that they, too,
+might witness the memorable trial of the boy prisoner.  Sachem after
+sachem rose and spoke.  Tobacco was sacrificed to the fire-god.  Would
+the relatives of the dead Mohawks consider the wampum belts full
+compensation?  Could the Iroquois suffer a youth to live who had joined
+the murderers of the Mohawks?  Could the Mohawks afford to offend the
+great Iroquois chief who was the French youth's friend?  As they
+deliberated, the other councillors returned, accompanied by all the
+members of Radisson's friendly family.  Again the father sang and
+spoke.  This time when he finished, instead of sitting down, he caught
+the necklace of wampum from Radisson's neck, threw it at the feet of
+the oldest sachem, cut the captive's bonds, and, amid shouts of
+applause, set the white youth free.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+One of the incomprehensible things to civilization is how a white man
+<I>can</I> degenerate to savagery.  Young Radisson's life is an
+illustration.  In the first transports of his freedom, with the Mohawk
+women dancing and singing around him, the men shouting, he leaped up,
+oblivious of pain; but when the flush of ecstasy had passed, he sank to
+the mat of the Iroquois lodge, and he was unable to use his burned feet
+for more than a month.  During this time the Iroquois dressed his
+wounds, brought him the choice portions of the hunt, gave him clean
+clothing purchased at Orange (Albany), and attended to his wants as if
+he had been a prince.  No doubt the bright eyes of the swarthy young
+French boy moved to pity the hearts of the Mohawk mothers, and his
+courage had won him favor among the warriors.  He was treated like a
+king.  The women waited upon him like slaves, and the men gave him
+presents of firearms and ammunition&mdash;the Indian's most precious
+possessions.  Between flattered vanity and indolence, other white men,
+similarly treated, have lost their self-respect.  Beckworth, of the
+Missouri, became to all intents and purposes a savage; and Bird, of the
+Blackfeet, degenerated lower than the Indians.  Other Frenchmen
+captured from the St. Lawrence, and white women taken from the New
+England colonies, became so enamored of savage life that they refused
+to leave the Indian lodges when peace had liberated them.  Not so
+Radisson.  Though only seventeen, flattered vanity never caused him to
+forget the gratitude he owed the Mohawk family.  Though he relates his
+life with a frankness that leaves nothing untold, he never at any time
+returned treachery for kindness.  The very chivalry of the French
+nature endangered him all the more.  Would he forget his manhood, his
+birthright of a superior race, his inheritance of nobility from a
+family that stood foremost among the <I>noblesse</I> of New France?
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-032"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-032.jpg" ALT="Albany, from an Old Print." BORDER="2" WIDTH="393" HEIGHT="252">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Albany, from an Old Print.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The spring of 1653 came with unloosening of the rivers and stirring of
+the forest sap and fret of the warrior blood.  Radisson's Iroquois
+father held great feasts in which he heaved up the hatchet to break the
+kettle of sagamite against all enemies.  Would Radisson go on the
+war-path with the braves, or stay at home with the women and so lose
+the respect of the tribe?  In the hope of coming again within reach of
+Three Rivers, he offered to join the Iroquois in their wars.  The
+Mohawks were delighted with his spirit, but they feared to lose their
+young warrior.  Accepting his offer, they refused to let him accompany
+them to Quebec, but assigned him to a band of young braves, who were to
+raid the border-lands between the Huron country of the Upper Lakes and
+the St. Lawrence.  This was not what Radisson wanted, but he could not
+draw back.  There followed months of wild wanderings round the regions
+of Niagara.  The band of young braves passed dangerous places with
+great precipices and a waterfall, where the river was a mile wide and
+unfrozen.  Radisson was constrained to witness many acts against the
+Eries, which must have one of two effects on white blood,&mdash;either turn
+the white man into a complete savage, or disgust him utterly with
+savage life.  Leaving the Mohawk village amid a blare of guns and
+shouts, the young braves on their maiden venture passed successively
+through the lodges of Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas, where
+they were feasted almost to death by the Iroquois Confederacy.[11]
+Then they marched to the vast wilderness of snow-padded forests and
+heaped windfall between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Snow still lay in great drifts under the shadow of hemlock and spruce;
+and the braves skimmed forward winged with the noiseless speed of
+snow-shoes.  When the snow became too soft from thaw for snow-shoes,
+they paused to build themselves a skiff.  It was too early to peel the
+bark off the birch, so they made themselves a dugout of the walnut
+tree.  The wind changed from north to south, clearing the lakes of ice
+and filling the air with the earthy smells of up-bursting growth.
+"There was such a thawing," writes Radisson, "ye little brookes flowed
+like rivers, which made us embark to wander over that sweet sea."
+Lounging in their skiff all day, carried from shore to shore with the
+waves, and sleeping round camp-fires on the sand each night, the young
+braves luxuriated in all the delights of sunny idleness and spring
+life.  But this was not war.  It was play, and play of the sort that
+weans the white man from civilization to savagery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One day a scout, who had climbed to the top of a tree, espied two
+strange squaws.  They were of a hostile tribe.  The Mohawk bloodthirst
+was up as a wolf's at the sight of lambs.  In vain Radisson tried to
+save the women by warning the Iroquois that if there were women, there
+must be men, too, who would exact vengeance for the squaws' death.  The
+young braves only laid their plans the more carefully for his warning
+and massacred the entire encampment.  Prisoners were taken, but when
+food became scarce they were brutally knocked on the head.  These
+tribes had never heard guns before, and at the sound of shots fled as
+from diabolical enemies.  It was an easy matter for the young braves in
+the course of a few weeks to take a score of scalps and a dozen
+prisoners.  At one place more than two hundred beaver were trapped.  At
+the end of the raid, the booty was equally divided.  Radisson asked
+that the woman prisoner be given to him; and he saved her from torture
+and death on the return to the Mohawks by presenting her as a slave to
+his Indian mother.  All his other share of booty he gave to the
+friendly family.  The raid was over.  He had failed of his main object
+in joining it.  He had not escaped.  But he had made one important
+gain.  His valor had re�stablished the confidence of the Indians so
+that when they went on a free-booting expedition against the whites of
+the Dutch settlements at Orange (Albany), Radisson was taken with them.
+Orange, or Albany, consisted at that time of some fifty thatched
+log-houses surrounded by a settlement of perhaps a hundred and fifty
+farmers.  This raid was bloodless.  The warriors looted the farmers'
+cabins, emptied their cupboards, and drank their beer cellars dry to
+the last drop.  Once more Radisson kept his head.  While the braves
+entered Fort Orange roaring drunk, Radisson was alert and sober.  A
+drunk Indian falls an easy prey in the bartering of pelts.  The
+Iroquois wanted guns.  The Dutch wanted pelts.  The whites treated the
+savages like kings; and the Mohawks marched from house to house
+feasting of the best.  Radisson was dressed in garnished buckskin and
+had been painted like a Mohawk.  Suspecting some design to escape, his
+Iroquois friends never left him.  The young Frenchman now saw white men
+for the first time in almost two years; but the speech that he heard
+was in a strange tongue.  As Radisson went into the fort, he noticed a
+soldier among the Dutch.  At the same instant the soldier recognized
+him as a Frenchman, and oblivious of the Mohawks' presence blurted out
+his discovery in Iroquois dialect, vowing that for all the paint and
+grease, this youth was a white man below.  The fellow's blundering
+might have cost Radisson's life; but the youth had not been a captive
+among crafty Mohawks for nothing.  Radisson feigned surprise at the
+accusation.  That quieted the Mohawk suspicions and they were presently
+deep in the beer pots of the Dutch.  Again the soldier spoke, this time
+in French.  It was the first time that Radisson had heard his native
+tongue for months.  He answered in French.  At that the soldier emitted
+shouts of delight, for he, too, was French, and these strangers in an
+alien land threw their arms about each other like a pair of long-lost
+brothers with exclamations of joy too great for words.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-037"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-037.jpg" ALT="The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time." BORDER="2" WIDTH="367" HEIGHT="274">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+From that moment Radisson became the lion of Fort Orange.  The women
+dragged him to their houses and forced more dainties on him than he
+could eat.  He was conducted from house to house in triumph, to the
+amazed delight of the Indians.  The Dutch offered to ransom him at any
+price; but that would have exposed the Dutch settlement to the
+resentment of the Mohawks and placed Radisson under heavy obligation to
+people who were the enemies of New France.  Besides, his honor was
+pledged to return to his Indian parents; and it was a long way home to
+have to sail to Europe and back again to Quebec.  Perhaps, too, there
+was deep in his heart what he did not realize&mdash;a rooted love for the
+wilds that was to follow him all through life.  By the devious course
+of captivity, he had tasted of a new freedom and could not give it up.
+He declined the offer of the Dutch.  In two days he was back among the
+Mohawks ten times more a hero than he had ever been.  Mother and
+sisters were his slaves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But between love of the wilds and love of barbarism is a wide
+difference.  He had not been back for two weeks when that glimpse of
+crude civilization at Orange recalled torturing memories of the French
+home in Three Rivers.  The filthy food, the smoky lodges, the cruelties
+of the Mohawks, filled him with loathing.  The nature of the white man,
+which had been hidden under the grease and paint of the savage&mdash;and in
+danger of total eclipse&mdash;now came upper-most.  With Radisson, to think
+was to act.  He determined to escape if it cost him his life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Taking only a hatchet as if he were going to cut wood, Radisson left
+the Indian lodge early one morning in the fall of 1653.  Once out of
+sight from the village, he broke into a run, following the trail
+through the dense forests of the Mohawk Valley toward Fort Orange.  On
+and on he ran, all that day, without pause to rest or eat, without
+backward glance, with eye ever piercing through the long leafy vistas
+of the forest on the watch for the fresh-chipped bark of the trees that
+guided his course, or the narrow indurated path over the spongy mould
+worn by running warriors.  And when night filled the forest with the
+hoot of owl, and the far, weird cries of wild creatures on the rove,
+there sped through the aisled columns of star light and shadow, the
+ghostly figure of the French boy slim, and lithe as a willow, with
+muscles tense as ironwood, and step silent as the mountain-cat.  All
+that night he ran without a single stop.  Chill daybreak found him
+still staggering on, over rocks slippery with the night frost, over
+windfall tree on tree in a barricade, through brawling mountain brooks
+where his moccasins broke the skim of ice at the edge, past rivers
+where he half waded, half swam.  He was now faint from want of food;
+but fear spurred him on.  The morning air was so cold that he found it
+better to run than rest.  By four of the afternoon he came to a
+clearing in the forest, where was the cabin of a settler.  A man was
+chopping wood.  Radisson ascertained that there were no Iroquois in the
+cabin, and, hiding in it, persuaded the settler to carry a message to
+Fort Orange, two miles farther on.  While he waited Indians passed the
+cabin, singing and shouting.  The settler's wife concealed him behind
+sacks of wheat and put out all lights.  Within an hour came a rescue
+party from Orange, who conducted him safely to the fort.  For three
+days Radisson hid in Orange, while the Mohawks wandered through the
+fort, calling him by name.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gifts of money from the Jesuit, Poncet, and from a Dutch merchant,
+enabled Radisson to take ship from Orange to New York, and from New
+York to Europe.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-041"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-041.jpg" ALT="Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving." BORDER="2" WIDTH="393" HEIGHT="285">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in<BR>
+Holland.  This view of Fort Amsterdam on the Manhattan is copied from<BR>
+an ancient engraving executed in Holland.  The fort was erected in 1623<BR>
+but finished upon the above model by Governor Van Twiller in 1635.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+P�re Poncet had been captured by the Mohawks the preceding summer, but
+had escaped to Orange.[12]  Embarking on a small sloop, Radisson sailed
+down the Hudson to New York, which then consisted of some five hundred
+houses, with stores, barracks, a stone church, and a dilapidated fort.
+Central Park was a forest; goats and cows pastured on what is now Wall
+Street; and to east and west was a howling wilderness of marsh and
+woods.  After a stay of three weeks, Radisson embarked for Amsterdam,
+which he reached in January, 1654.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] Benjamin Sulte in <I>Chronique Trifluvienne</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] It was in August of this same year, 1652, that the governor of
+Three Rivers was slain by the Iroquois.  Parkman gives this date, 1653,
+Garneau, 1651, L'Abb� Tanguay, 1651; Dollier de Casson, 1651, Belmont,
+1653.  Sulte gives the name of the governor Duplessis-Kerbodot, not
+Bochart, as given in Parkman.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] Dr. Bryce has unearthed the fact that in a petition to the House of
+Commons, 1698, Radisson sets down his age as sixty-two.  This gives the
+year of his birth as 1636.  On the other hand, Sulte has record of a
+Pierre Radisson registered at Quebec in 1681, aged fifty-one, which
+would make him slightly older, if it is the same Radisson.  Mr. Sulte's
+explanation is as follows: S�bastien Hayet of St. Malo married Madeline
+H�nault.  Their daughter Marguerite married Chouart, known as
+Groseillers.  Madeline H�nault then married Pierre Esprit Radisson of
+Paris, whose children were Pierre, our hero, and two daughters.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[4] A despatch from M. Talon in 1666 shows there were 461 families in
+Three Rivers.  State papers from the Minister to M. Frontenac in 1674
+show there were only 6705 French in all the colony.  Averaging five a
+family, there must have been 2000 people at Three Rivers.  Fear of the
+Iroquois must have driven the country people inside the fort, so that
+the population enrolled was larger than the real population of Three
+Rivers.  Sulte gives the normal population of Three Rivers in 1654 as
+38 married couples, 13 bachelors, 38 boys, 26 girls&mdash;in all not 200.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[5] At first flush, this seems a slip in <I>Radisson's Relation</I>.  Where
+did the Mohawks get their guns?  <I>New York Colonial Documents</I> show
+that between 1640 and 1650 the Dutch at Fort Orange had supplied the
+Mohawks alone with four hundred guns.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[6] One of many instances of Radisson's accuracy in detail.  All tribes
+have a trick of browning food on hot stones or sand that has been taken
+from fire.  The Assiniboines gained their name from this practice: they
+were the users of "boiling stones."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[7] I have asked both natives and old fur-traders what combination of
+sounds in English most closely resembles the Indian war-cry, and they
+have all given the words that I have quoted.  One daughter of a chief
+factor, who went through a six weeks' siege by hostiles in her father's
+fort, gave a still more graphic description.  She said: "you can
+imagine the snarls of a pack of furiously vicious dogs saying 'ah-oh'
+with a whoop, you have it; and you will not forget it!"
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[8] This practice was a binding law on many tribes.  Catlin relates it
+of the Mandans, and Hearne of the Chipewyans.  The latter considered it
+a crime to kiss wives and children after a massacre without the bath of
+purification.  Could one know where and when that universal custom of
+washing blood-guilt arose, one mystery of existence would be unlocked.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[9] I have throughout followed Mr. Sulte's correction of the name of
+this governor.  The mistake followed by Parkman, Tanguay, and
+others&mdash;it seems&mdash;was first made in 1820, and has been faithfully
+copied since.  Elsewhere will be found Mr. Sulte's complete elucidation
+of the hopeless dark in which all writers have involved Radisson's
+family.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[10] If there were not corroborative testimony, one might suspect the
+excited French lad of gross exaggeration in his account of Iroquois
+tortures; but the Jesuits more than confirm the worst that Radisson
+relates.  Bad as these torments were, they were equalled by the deeds
+of white troops from civilized cities in the nineteenth century.  A
+band of Montana scouts came on the body of a comrade horribly mutilated
+by the Indians.  They caught the culprits a few days afterwards.
+Though the government report has no account of what happened, traders
+say the bodies of the guilty Indians were found skinned and scalped by
+the white troops.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[11] Radisson puts the Senecas before the Cayugas, which is different
+from the order given by the Jesuits.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[12] The fact that Radisson confessed his sins to this priest seems
+pretty well to prove that Pierre was a Catholic and not a Protestant,
+as has been so often stated.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER II
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1657-1658
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the
+Iroquois Mission&mdash;He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the
+Thousand Islands&mdash;Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as
+Prisoners of War&mdash;Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+From Amsterdam Radisson took ship to Rochelle.  Here he found himself a
+stranger in his native land.  All his kin of whom there is any
+record&mdash;Pierre Radisson, his father, Madeline H�nault, his mother,
+Marguerite and Fran�oise, his elder and younger sisters, his uncle and
+aunt, with their daughter, Elizabeth&mdash;were now living at Three Rivers
+in New France.[1]  Embarking with the fishing fleet that yearly left
+France for the Grand Banks, Radisson came early in the spring of 1654
+to Isle Perc�e at the mouth of the St. Lawrence.  He was still a week's
+journey from Three Rivers, but chance befriended him.  Algonquin canoes
+were on the way up the river to war on the Iroquois.  Joining the
+Indian canoes, he slipped past the hilly shores of the St. Lawrence and
+in five days was between the main bank on the north side and the muddy
+shallows of the Isle of Orleans.  Sheering out where the Montmorency
+roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across
+St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below
+the beetling heights of Cape Diamond, Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-043"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-043.jpg" ALT="One of the earliest maps of the Great Lakes." BORDER="2" WIDTH="643" HEIGHT="393">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: One of the earliest maps of the Great Lakes.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+It was May, 1651, when he had first seen the turrets and spires of
+Quebec glittering on the hillside in the sun; it was May, 1652, that
+the Iroquois had carried him off from Three Rivers; and it was May,
+1654, when he came again to his own.  He was welcomed back as from the
+dead.  Changes had taken place in the interval of his captivity.  A
+truce had been arranged between the Iroquois and the French.  Now that
+the Huron missions had been wiped out by Iroquois wars, the Jesuits
+regarded the truce as a Divine provision for a mission among the
+Iroquois.  The year that Radisson escaped from the Mohawks, Jesuit
+priests had gone among them.  A still greater change that was to affect
+his life more vitally had taken place in the Radisson family.  The year
+that Radisson had been captured, the outraged people of Three Rivers
+had seized a Mohawk chief and burned him to death.  In revenge, the
+Mohawks murdered the governor of Three Rivers and a company of
+Frenchmen.  Among the slain was the husband of Radisson's sister,
+Marguerite.  When Radisson returned, he found that his widowed sister
+had married M�dard Chouart Groseillers, a famous fur trader of New
+France, who had passed his youth as a lay helper to the Jesuit missions
+of Lake Huron.[2]  Radisson was now doubly bound to the Jesuits by
+gratitude and family ties.  Never did pagan heart hear an evangel more
+gladly than the Mohawks heard the Jesuits.  The priests were welcomed
+with acclaim, led to the Council Lodge, and presented with belts of
+wampum.  Not a suspicion of foul play seems to have entered the
+Jesuits' mind.  When the Iroquois proposed to incorporate into the
+Confederacy the remnants of the Hurons, the Jesuits discerned nothing
+in the plan but the most excellent means to convert pagan Iroquois by
+Christian Hurons.  Having gained an inch, the Iroquois demanded the
+proverbial ell.  They asked that a French settlement be made in the
+Iroquois country.  The Indians wanted a supply of firearms to war
+against all enemies; and with a French settlement miles away from help,
+the Iroquois could wage what war they pleased against the Algonquins
+without fear of reprisals from Quebec&mdash;the settlement of white men
+among hostiles would be hostage of generous treatment from New France.
+Of these designs, neither priests nor governor had the slightest
+suspicion.  The Jesuits were thinking only of the Iroquois' soul; the
+French, of peace with the Iroquois at any cost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1656 Major Dupuis and fifty Frenchmen had established a French
+colony among the Iroquois.[3]  The hardships of these pioneers form no
+part of Radisson's life, and are, therefore, not set down here.  Peace
+not bought by a victory is an unstable foundation for Indian treaty.
+The Mohawks were jealous that their confederates, the Onondagas, had
+obtained the French settlement.  In 1657, eighty Iroquois came to
+Quebec to escort one hundred Huron refugees back to Onondaga for
+adoption into the Confederacy.  These Hurons were Christians, and the
+two Jesuits, Paul Ragueneau and Fran�ois du P�ron, were appointed to
+accompany them to their new abode.  Twenty young Frenchmen joined the
+party to seek their fortunes at the new settlement; but a man was
+needed who could speak Iroquois.  Glad to repay his debt to the
+Jesuits, young Radisson volunteered to go as a <I>donn�</I>, that is, a lay
+helper vowed to gratuitous services.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was midsummer before all preparations had been made.  On July 26,
+the party of two hundred, made up of twenty Frenchmen, eighty Iroquois,
+and a hundred Hurons, filed out of the gates of Montreal, and winding
+round the foot of the mountain followed a trail through the forest that
+took them past the Lachine Rapids.  The Onondaga <I>voyageurs</I> carried
+the long birch canoes inverted on their shoulders, two Indians at each
+end; and the other Iroquois trotted over the rocks with the Frenchmen's
+baggage on their backs.  The day was hot, the <I>portage</I> long and
+slippery with dank moisture.  The Huron children fagged and fell
+behind.  At nightfall, thirty of the haughty Iroquois lost patience,
+and throwing down their bundles made off for Quebec with the avowed
+purpose of raiding the Algonquins.  On the way, they paused to scalp
+three Frenchmen at Montreal, cynically explaining that if the French
+persisted in taking Algonquins into their arms, the white men need not
+be surprised if the blow aimed at an Algonquin sometimes struck a
+Frenchman.  That act opened the eyes of the French to the real meaning
+of the peace made with the Iroquois; but the little colony was beyond
+recall.  To insure the safety of the French among the Onondagas, the
+French governor at Quebec seized a dozen Iroquois and kept them as
+hostages of good conduct.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, all was confusion on Lake St. Louis, where the last band of
+colonists had encamped.  The Iroquois had cast the Frenchmen's baggage
+on the rocks and refused to carry it farther.  Leaving the whites all
+embarrassed, the Onondagas hurriedly embarked the Hurons and paddled
+quickly out of sight.  The act was too suddenly unanimous not to have
+been premeditated.  Why had the Iroquois carried the Hurons away from
+the Frenchmen?  Father Ragueneau at once suspected some sinister
+purpose.  Taking only a single sack of flour for food, he called for
+volunteers among the twenty Frenchmen to embark in a leaky, old canoe
+and follow the treacherous Onondagas.  Young Radisson was one of the
+first to offer himself.  Six others followed his example; and the seven
+Frenchmen led by the priest struck across the lake, leaving the others
+to gather up the scattered baggage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Onondagas were too deep to reveal their plots with seven armed
+Frenchmen in pursuit.  The Indians permitted the French boats to come
+up with the main band.  All camped together in the most friendly
+fashion that night; but the next morning one Iroquois offered passage
+in his canoe to one Frenchman, another Iroquois to another of the
+whites, and by the third day, when they came to Lake St. Francis, the
+old canoe had been abandoned.  The French were scattered promiscuously
+among the Iroquois, with no two whites in one boat.  The Hurons were
+quicker to read the signs of treachery than the French.  There were
+rumors of one hundred Mohawks lying in ambush at the Thousand Islands
+to massacre the coming Hurons.  On the morning of August 3 four Huron
+warriors and two women seized a canoe, and to the great astonishment of
+the encampment launched out before they could be stopped.  Heading the
+canoe back for Montreal, they broke out in a war chant of defiance to
+the Iroquois.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Onondagas made no sign, but they evidently took council to delay no
+longer.  Again, when they embarked, they allowed no two whites in one
+canoe.  The boats spread out.  Nothing was said to indicate anything
+unusual.  The lake lay like a silver mirror in the August sun.  The
+water was so clear that the Indians frequently paused to spear fish
+lying below on the stones.  At places the canoes skirted close to the
+wood-fringed shore, and braves landed to shoot wild-fowl.  Radisson and
+Ragueneau seemed simultaneously to have noticed the same thing.
+Without any signal, at about four in the afternoon, the Onondagas
+steered their canoes for a wooded island in the middle of the St.
+Lawrence.  With Radisson were three Iroquois and a Huron.  As the canoe
+grated shore, the bowman loaded his musket and sprang into the thicket.
+Naturally, the Huron turned to gaze after the disappearing hunter.
+Instantly, the Onondaga standing directly behind buried his hatchet in
+the Huron's head.  The victim fell quivering across Radisson's feet and
+was hacked to pieces by the other Iroquois.  Not far along the shore
+from Radisson, the priest was landing.  He noticed an Iroquois chief
+approach a Christian Huron girl.  If the Huron had not been a convert,
+she might have saved her life by becoming one of the chief's many
+slaves; but she had repulsed the Onondaga pagan.  As Ragueneau looked,
+the girl fell dead with her skull split by the chief's war-axe.  The
+Hurons on the lake now knew what awaited them; and a cry of terror
+arose from the children.  Then a silence of numb horror settled over
+the incoming canoes.  The women were driven ashore like lambs before
+wolves; but the valiant Hurons would not die without striking one blow
+at their inveterate and treacherous enemies.  They threw themselves
+together back to back, prepared to fight.  For a moment this show of
+resistance drove off the Iroquois.  Then the Onondaga chieftain rushed
+forward, protesting that the two murders had been a personal quarrel.
+Striking back his own warriors with a great show of sincerity, he bade
+the Hurons run for refuge to the top of the hill.  No sooner had the
+Hurons broken rank, than there rushed from the woods scores of
+Iroquois, daubed in war-paint and shouting their war-cry.  This was the
+hunt to which the young braves had dashed from the canoes to be in
+readiness behind the thicket.  Before the scattered Hurons could get
+together for defence, the Onondagas had closed around the hilltop in a
+cordon.  The priest ran here, there, everywhere,&mdash;comforting the dying,
+stopping mutilation, defending the women.  All the Hurons were
+massacred but one man, and the bodies were thrown into the river.  With
+blankets drawn over their heads that they might not see, the women
+huddled together, dumb with terror.  When the Onondagas turned toward
+the women, the Frenchmen stood with muskets levelled.  The Onondagas
+halted, conferred, and drew off.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-050"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-050.jpg" ALT="Paddling past Hostiles." BORDER="2" WIDTH="404" HEIGHT="202">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Paddling past Hostiles.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The fight lasted for four hours.  Darkness and the valor of the little
+French band saved the women for the time.  The Iroquois kindled a fire
+and gathered to celebrate their victory.  Then the old priest took his
+life in his hands.  Borrowing three belts of wampum, he left the
+huddling group of Huron women and Frenchmen and marched boldly into the
+circle of hostiles.  The lives of all the French and Hurons hung by a
+thread.  Ragueneau had been the spiritual guide of the murdered tribe
+for twenty years; and he was now sobbing like a child.  The Iroquois
+regarded his grief with sardonic scorn; but they misjudged the manhood
+below the old priest's tears.  Ragueneau asked leave to speak.  They
+grunted permission.  Springing up, he broke into impassioned, fearless
+reproaches of the Iroquois for their treachery.  Casting one belt of
+wampum at the Onondaga chief's feet, the priest demanded pledges that
+the massacre cease.  A second belt was given to register the Onondaga's
+vow to conduct the women and children safely to the Iroquois country.
+The third belt was for the safety of the French at Onondaga.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Iroquois were astonished.  They had looked for womanish pleadings.
+They had heard stern demands coupled with fearless threats of
+punishment.  When Ragueneau sat down, the Onondaga chief bestirred
+himself to counteract the priest's powerful impression.  Lounging to
+his feet, the Onondaga impudently declared that the governor of Quebec
+had instigated the massacre.  Ragueneau leaped up with a denial that
+took the lie from the scoundrel's teeth.  The chief sat down abashed.
+The Council grunted "Ho, ho!" accepting the wampum and promising all
+that the Jesuit had asked.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Among the Thousand Islands, the French who had remained behind to
+gather up the baggage again joined the Onondagas.  They brought with
+them from the Isle of Massacres a poor Huron woman, whom they had found
+lying insensible on a rock.  During the massacre she had hidden in a
+hollow tree, where she remained for three days.  In this region,
+Radisson almost lost his life by hoisting a blanket sail to his canoe.
+The wind drifted the boat so far out that Radisson had to throw all
+ballast overboard to keep from being swamped.  As they turned from the
+St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario up the Oswego River for Onondaga, they
+met other warriors of the Iroquois nation.  In spite of pledges to the
+priest, the meeting was celebrated by torturing the Huron women to
+entertain the newcomers.  Not the sufferings of the early Christians in
+Rome exceeded the martyrdom of the Christian Hurons among the
+Onondagas.  As her mother mounted the scaffold of tortures, a little
+girl who had been educated by the Ursulines of Quebec broke out with
+loud weeping.  The Huron mother turned calmly to the child:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Weep not my death, my little daughter!  We shall this day be in
+heaven," said she; "God will pity us to all eternity.  The Iroquois
+cannot rob us of that."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the flames crept about her, her voice was heard chanting in the
+crooning monotone of Indian death dirge: "Jesu&mdash;have pity on us!
+Jesu&mdash;have pity on us!"  The next moment the child was thrown into the
+flames, repeating the same words.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Iroquois recognized Radisson.  He sent presents to his Mohawk
+parents, who afterwards played an important part in saving the French
+of Onondaga.  Having passed the falls, they came to the French fort
+situated on the crest of a hill above a lake.  Two high towers
+loopholed for musketry occupied the centre of the courtyard.  Double
+walls, trenched between, ran round a space large enough to enable the
+French to keep their cattle inside the fort.  The <I>voyageurs</I> were
+welcomed to Onondaga by Major Dupuis, fifty Frenchmen, and several
+Jesuits.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The pilgrims had scarcely settled at Onondaga before signs of the
+dangers that were gathering became too plain for the blind zeal of the
+Jesuits to ignore.  Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas, togged out in
+war-gear, swarmed outside the palisades.  There was no more dissembling
+of hunger for the Jesuits' evangel.  The warriors spoke no more soft
+words, but spent their time feasting, chanting war-songs, heaving up
+the war-hatchet against the kettle of sagamite&mdash;which meant the rupture
+of peace.  Then came four hundred Mohawks, who not only shouted their
+war-songs, but built their wigwams before the fort gates and
+established themselves for the winter like a besieging army.  That the
+intent of the entire Confederacy was hostile to Onondaga could not be
+mistaken; but what was holding the Indians back?  Why did they delay
+the massacre?  Then Huron slaves brought word to the besieged fort of
+the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec.  The fort understood what
+stayed the Iroquois blow.  The Confederacy dared not attack the
+isolated fort lest Quebec should take terrible vengeance on the
+hostages.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-056"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-056.jpg" ALT="Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, who was tortured by the Mohawks." BORDER="2" WIDTH="221" HEIGHT="408">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, who was tortured by the
+Mohawks.  <BR>From a painting in Ch�teau de Ramezay, Montreal.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+
+
+<P>
+The French decided to send messengers to Quebec for instructions before
+closing navigation cut them off for the winter.  Thirteen men and one
+Jesuit left the fort the first week of September.  Mohawk spies knew of
+the departure and lay in ambush at each side of the narrow river to
+intercept the party; but the messengers eluded the trap by striking
+through the forests back from the river directly to the St. Lawrence.
+Then the little fort closed its gates and awaited an answer from
+Quebec.  Winter settled over the land, blocking the rivers with ice and
+the forest trails with drifts of snow; but no messengers came back from
+Quebec.  The Mohawks had missed the outgoing scouts: but they caught
+the return coureurs and destroyed the letters.  Not a soul could leave
+the fort but spies dogged his steps.  The Jesuits continued going from
+lodge to lodge, and in this way Onondaga gained vague knowledge of the
+plots outside the fort.  The French could venture out only at the risk
+of their lives, and spent the winter as closely confined as prisoners
+of war.  Of the ten drilled soldiers, nine threatened to desert.  One
+night an unseen hand plunged through the dark, seized the sentry, and
+dragged him from the gate.  The sentry drew his sword and shouted, "To
+arms!"  A band of Frenchmen sallied from the gates with swords and
+muskets.  In the tussle the sentry was rescued, and gifts were sent out
+in the morning to pacify the wounded Mohawks.  Fortunately the besieged
+had plenty of food inside the stockades; but the Iroquois knew there
+could be no escape till the ice broke up in spring, and were quite
+willing to exchange ample supplies of corn for tobacco and firearms.
+The Huron slaves who carried the corn to the fort acted as spies among
+the Mohawks for the French.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the month of February the vague rumors of conspiracy crystallized
+into terrible reality.  A dying Mohawk confessed to a Jesuit that the
+Iroquois[4] Council had determined to massacre half the company of
+French and to hold the other half till their own Mohawk hostages were
+released from Quebec.  Among the hostiles encamped before the gates was
+Radisson's Indian father.  This Mohawk was still an influential member
+of the Great Council.  He, too, reported that the warriors were bent on
+destroying Onondaga.[5]  What was to be done?  No answer had come from
+Quebec, and no aid could come till the spring.  The rivers were still
+blocked with ice; and there were not sufficient boats in the fort to
+carry fifty men down to Quebec.  "What could we do?" writes Radisson.
+"We were in their hands.  It was as hard to get away from them as for a
+ship in full sea without a pilot."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They at once began constructing two large flat-bottomed boats of light
+enough draft to run the rapids in the flood-tide of spring.  Carpenters
+worked hidden in an attic; but when the timbers were mortised together,
+the boats had to be brought downstairs, where one of the Huron slaves
+caught a glimpse of them.  Boats of such a size he had never before
+seen.  Each was capable of carrying fifteen passengers with full
+complement of baggage.  Spring rains were falling in floods.  The
+convert Huron had heard the Jesuits tell of Noah's ark in the deluge.
+Returning to the Mohawks, he spread a terrifying report of an impending
+flood and of strange arks of refuge built by the white men.  Emissaries
+were appointed to visit the French fort; but the garrison had been
+forewarned.  Radisson knew of the coming spies from his Indian father;
+and the Jesuits had learned of the Council from their converts.  Before
+the spies arrived, the French had built a floor over their flatboats,
+and to cover the fresh floor had heaped up a dozen canoes.  The spies
+left the fort satisfied that neither a deluge nor an escape was
+impending.  Birch canoes would be crushed like egg-shells if they were
+run through the ice jams of spring floods.  Certain that their victims
+were trapped, the Iroquois were in no haste to assault a double-walled
+fort, where musketry could mow them down as they rushed the hilltop.
+The Indian is bravest under cover; so the Mohawks spread themselves in
+ambush on each side of the narrow river and placed guards at the falls
+where any boats must be <I>portaged</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of what good were the boats?  To allay suspicion of escape, the Jesuits
+continued to visit the wigwams.[6]  The French were in despair.  They
+consulted Radisson, who could go among the Mohawks as with a charmed
+life, and who knew the customs of the Confederacy so well.  Radisson
+proposed a way to outwit the savages.  With this plan the priests had
+nothing to do.  To the harum-scarum Radisson belong the sole credit and
+discredit of the escapade.  On his device hung the lives of fifty
+innocent men.  These men must either escape or be massacred.  Of
+bloodshed, Radisson had already seen too much; and the youth of
+twenty-one now no more proposed to stickle over the means of victory
+than generals who wear the Victoria cross stop to stickle over means
+to-day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson knew that the Indians had implicit faith in dreams; so
+Radisson had a dream.[7]  He realized as critics of Indian customs fail
+to understand that the fearful privations of savage life teach the
+crime of waste.  The Indian will eat the last morsel of food set before
+him if he dies for it.  He believes that the gods punish waste of food
+by famine.  The belief is a religious principle and the
+feasts&mdash;<I>festins � tout manger</I>&mdash;are a religious act; so Radisson
+dreamed&mdash;whether sleeping or waking&mdash;that the white men were to give a
+great festival to the Iroquois.  This dream he related to his Indian
+father.  The Indian like his white brother can clothe a vice under
+religious mantle.  The Iroquois were gluttonous on a religious
+principle.  Radisson's dream was greeted with joy.  <I>Coureurs</I> ran
+through the forest, bidding the Mohawks to the feast.  Leaving ambush
+of forest and waterfall, the warriors hastened to the walls of
+Onondaga.  To whet their appetite, they were kept waiting outside for
+two whole days.  The French took turns in entertaining the waiting
+guests.  Boisterous games, songs, dances, and music kept the Iroquois
+awake and hilarious to the evening of the second day.  Inside the fort
+bedlam reigned.  Boats were dragged from floors to a sally-port at the
+rear of the courtyard.  Here firearms, ammunition, food, and baggage
+were placed in readiness.  Guns which could not be taken were burned or
+broken.  Ammunition was scattered in the snow.  All the stock but one
+solitary pig, a few chickens, and the dogs was sacrificed for the
+feast, and in the barracks a score of men were laboring over enormous
+kettles of meat.  Had an Indian spy climbed to the top of a tree and
+looked over the palisades, all would have been discovered; but the
+French entertainers outside kept their guests busy.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-061"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-061.jpg" ALT="Ch�teau de Ramezay, Montreal, for years the residence o" BORDER="2" WIDTH="400" HEIGHT="352">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Ch�teau de Ramezay, Montreal, for years the residence of
+the governor,<BR> and later the storehouse of the fur companies.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+On the evening of the second day a great fire was kindled in the outer
+enclosure, between the two walls.  The trumpets blew a deafening blast.
+The Mohawks answered with a shout.  The French clapped their hands.
+The outer gates were thrown wide open, and in trooped several hundred
+Mohawk warriors, seating themselves in a circle round the fire.
+Another blare of trumpets, and twelve enormous kettles of mincemeat
+were carried round the circle of guests.  A Mohawk chief rose solemnly
+and gave his deities of earth, air, and fire profuse thanks for having
+brought such generous people as the French among the Iroquois.  Other
+chiefs arose and declaimed to their hearers that earth did not contain
+such hosts as the French.  Before they had finished speaking there came
+a second and a third and a fourth relay of kettles round the circle of
+feasters.  Not one Iroquois dared to refuse the food heaped before him.
+By the time the kettles of salted fowl and venison and bear had passed
+round the circle, each Indian was glancing furtively sideways to see if
+his neighbor could still eat.  He who was compelled to forsake the
+feast first was to become the butt of the company.  All the while the
+French kept up a din of drums and trumpets and flageolets, dancing and
+singing and shouting to drive off sleep.  The eyes of the gorging
+Indians began to roll.  Never had they attempted to demolish such a
+banquet.  Some shook their heads and drew back.  Others fell over in
+the dead sleep that results from long fasting and overfeeding and fresh
+air.  Radisson was everywhere, urging the Iroquois to "Cheer up! cheer
+up!  If sleep overcomes you, you must awake!  Beat the drum!  Blow the
+trumpet!  Cheer up!  Cheer up!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the end of the repulsive scene was at hand.  By midnight the
+Indians had&mdash;in the language of the white man&mdash;"gone under the
+mahogany."  They lay sprawled on the ground in sodden sleep.  Perhaps,
+too, something had been dropped in the fleshpots to make their sleep
+the sounder.  Radisson does not say no, neither does the priest, and
+they two were the only whites present who have written of the
+episode.[8]  But the French would hardly have been human if they had
+not assured their own safety by drugging the feasters.  It was a common
+thing for the fur traders of a later period to prevent massacre and
+quell riot by administering a quietus to Indians with a few drops of
+laudanum.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The French now retired to the inner court.  The main gate was bolted
+and chained.  Through the loophole of this gate ran a rope attached to
+a bell that was used to summon the sentry.  To this rope the
+mischievous Radisson tied the only remaining pig, so that when the
+Indians would pull the rope for admission, the noise of the disturbed
+pig would give the impression of a sentry's tramp-tramp on parade.
+Stuffed effigies of soldiers were then stuck about the barracks.  If a
+spy climbed up to look over the palisades, he would see Frenchmen still
+in the fort.  While Radisson was busy with these precautions to delay
+pursuit, the soldiers and priests, led by Major Dupuis, had broken open
+the sally-port, forced the boats through sideways, and launched out on
+the river.  Speaking in whispers, they stowed the baggage in the
+flat-boats, then brought out skiffs&mdash;dugouts to withstand the ice
+jam&mdash;for the rest of the company.  The night was raw and cold.  A skim
+of ice had formed on the margins of the river.  Through the pitchy
+darkness fell a sleet of rain and snow that washed out the footsteps of
+the fugitives.  The current of mid-river ran a noisy mill-race of ice
+and log drift; and the <I>voyageurs</I> could not see one boat length ahead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To men living in savagery come temptations that can neither be measured
+nor judged by civilization.  To the French at Onondaga came such a
+temptation now.  Their priests were busy launching the boats.  The
+departing soldiers seemed simultaneously to have become conscious of a
+very black suggestion.  Cooped up against the outer wall in the dead
+sleep of torpid gluttony lay the leading warriors of the Iroquois
+nation.  Were these not the assassins of countless Frenchmen, the
+murderers of women, the torturers of children?  Had Providence not
+placed the treacherous Iroquois in the hands of fifty Frenchmen?  If
+these warriors were slain, it would be an easy matter to march to the
+villages of the Confederacy, kill the old men, and take prisoners the
+women.  New France would be forever free of her most deadly enemy.
+Like the Indians, the white men were trying to justify a wrong under
+pretence of good.  By chance, word of the conspiracy was carried to the
+Jesuits.  With all the authority of the church, the priests forbade the
+crime.  "Their answer was," relates Radisson, "that they were sent to
+instruct in the faith of Jesus Christ and not to destroy, and that the
+cross must be their sword."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Locking the sally-port, the company&mdash;as the Jesuit father
+records&mdash;"shook the dust of Onondaga from their feet," launched out on
+the swift-flowing, dark river and escaped "as the children of Israel
+escaped by night from the land of Egypt."  They had not gone far
+through the darkness before the roar of waters told them of a cataract
+ahead.  They were four hours carrying baggage and boats over this
+<I>portage</I>.  Sleet beat upon their backs.  The rocks were slippery with
+glazed ice; and through the rotten, half-thawed snow, the men sank to
+mid-waist.  Navigation became worse on Lake Ontario; for the wind
+tossed the lake like a sea, and ice had whirled against the St.
+Lawrence in a jam.  On the St. Lawrence, they had to wait for the
+current to carry the ice out.  At places they cut a passage through the
+honeycombed ice with their hatchets, and again they were compelled to
+<I>portage</I> over the ice.  The water was so high that the rapids were
+safely ridden by all the boats but one, which was shipwrecked, and
+three of the men were drowned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They had left Onondaga on the 20th of March, 1658.  On the evening of
+April 3d they came to Montreal, where they learned that New France had
+all winter suffered intolerable insolence from the Iroquois, lest
+punishment of the hostiles should endanger the French at Onondaga.  The
+fleeing colonists waited twelve days at Montreal for the ice to clear,
+and were again held back by a jam at Three Rivers; but on April 23 they
+moored safely under the heights of Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Coureurs</I> from Onondaga brought word that the Mohawks had been
+deceived by the pig and the ringing bell and the effigies for more than
+a week.  Crowing came from the chicken yard, dogs bayed in their
+kennels, and when a Mohawk pulled the bell at the gate, he could hear
+the sentry's measured march.  At the end of seven days not a white man
+had come from the fort.  At first the Mohawks had thought the "black
+robes" were at prayers; but now suspicions of trickery flashed on the
+Iroquois.  Warriors climbed the palisades and found the fort empty.
+Two hundred Mohawks set out in pursuit; but the bad weather held them
+back.  And that was the way Radisson saved Onondaga.[9]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] The uncle, Pierre Esprit Radisson, is the one with whom careless
+writers have confused the young hero, owing to identity of name.
+Madeline H�nault has been described as the explorer's first wife,
+notwithstanding genealogical impossibilities which make the explorer's
+daughter thirty-six years old before he was seventeen.  Even the
+infallible Tanguay trips on Radisson's genealogy.  I have before me the
+complete record of the family taken from the parish registers of Three
+Rivers and Quebec, by the indefatigable Mr. Sulte, whose explanation of
+the case is this: that Radisson's mother, Madeline H�nault, first
+married S�bastien Hayet, of St. Malo, to whom was born Marguerite about
+1630; that her second husband was Pierre Esprit Radisson of Paris, to
+whom were born our hero and the sisters Fran�oise and Elizabeth.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] I have throughout referred to M�dard Chouart, Sieur des
+Groseillers, as simply "Groseillers," because that is the name
+referring to him most commonly used in the <I>State Papers</I> and old
+histories.  He was from Charly-Saint-Cyr, near Meaux, and is supposed
+to have been born about 1621.  His first wife was Helen Martin,
+daughter of Abraham Martin, who gave his name to the Plains of Abraham.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] This is the story of Onondaga which Parkman has told.
+Unfortunately, when Parkman's account was written, <I>Radisson's
+Journals</I> were unknown and Mr. Parkman had to rely entirely on the
+<I>Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation</I> and the <I>Jesuit Relations</I>.  After
+the discovery of <I>Radisson's Journals</I>, Parkman added a footnote to his
+account of Onondaga, <I>quoting</I> Radisson in confirmation.  If Radisson
+may be quoted to corroborate Parkman, Radisson may surely be accepted
+as authentic.  At the same time, I have compared this journal with
+Father Ragueneau's of the same party, and the two tally in every detail.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[4] See <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, 1657-1658.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[5] <I>Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[6] See Ragueneau's account.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[7] See <I>Marie de l'Incarnation</I> and Dr. Dionne's modern monograph.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[8] This account is drawn mainly from <I>Radisson's Journal</I>, partly from
+Father Ragueneau, and in one detail from a letter of <I>Marie de
+l'Incarnation</I>.  Garneau says the feasters were drugged, but I cannot
+find his authority for this, though from my knowledge of fur traders'
+escapes, I fancy it would hardly have been human nature not to add a
+sleeping potion to the kettles.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[9] The <I>festins � tout manger</I> must not be too sweepingly condemned by
+the self-righteous white man as long as drinking bouts are a part of
+civilized customs; and at least one civilized nation has the gross
+proverb, "Better burst than waste."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER III
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1658-1660
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RADISSON'S THIRD VOYAGE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Discovery of the Great Northwest&mdash;Radisson and his Brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, visit what are now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and the
+Canadian Northwest&mdash;Radisson's Prophecy on first beholding the
+West&mdash;Twelve Years before Marquette and Jolliet, Radisson sees the
+Mississippi&mdash;The Terrible Remains of Dollard's Fight seen on the Way
+down the Ottawa&mdash;Why Radisson's Explorations have been ignored
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+While Radisson was among the Iroquois, the little world of New France
+had not been asleep.  Before Radisson was born, Jean Nicolet of Three
+Rivers had passed westward through the straits of Mackinaw and coasted
+down Lake Michigan as far as Green Bay.[1]  Some years later the great
+Jesuit martyr, Jogues, had preached to the Indians of Sault Ste. Marie;
+but beyond the Sault was an unknown world that beckoned the young
+adventurers of New France as with the hands of a siren.  Of the great
+beyond&mdash;known to-day as the Great Northwest&mdash;nothing had been learned
+but this: from it came the priceless stores of beaver pelts yearly
+brought down the Ottawa to Three Rivers by the Algonquins, and in it
+dwelt strange, wild races whose territory extended northwest and north
+to unknown nameless seas.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Great Beyond held the two things most coveted by ambitious young
+men of New France,&mdash;quick wealth by means of the fur trade and the
+immortal fame of being a first explorer.  Nicolet had gone only as far
+as Green Bay and Fox River; Jogues not far beyond the Sault.  What
+secrets lay in the Great Unknown?  Year after year young Frenchmen,
+fired with the zeal of the explorer, joined wandering tribes of
+Algonquins going up the Ottawa, in the hope of being taken beyond the
+Sault.  In August, 1656, there came from Green Bay two young Frenchmen
+with fifty canoes of Algonquins, who told of far-distant waters called
+Lake "Ouinipeg," and tribes of wandering hunters called "Christinos"
+(Crees), who spent their winters in a land bare of trees (the prairie),
+and their summers on the North Sea (Hudson's Bay).  They also told of
+other tribes, who were great warriors, living to the south,&mdash;these were
+the Sioux.  But the two Frenchmen had not gone beyond the Great
+Lakes.[2]  These Algonquins were received at Ch�teau St. Louis, Quebec,
+with pompous firing of cannon and other demonstrations of welcome.  So
+eager were the French to take possession of the new land that thirty
+young men equipped themselves to go back with the Indians; and the
+Jesuits sent out two priests, Leonard Gareau and Gabriel Dreuillettes,
+with a lay helper, Louis Bo�sme.  The sixty canoes left Quebec with
+more firing of guns for a God-speed; but at Lake St. Peter the Mohawks
+ambushed the flotilla.  The enterprise of exploring the Great Beyond
+was abandoned by all the French but two.  Gareau, who was mortally
+wounded on the Ottawa, probably by a Frenchman or renegade hunter, died
+at Montreal; and Dreuillettes did not go farther than Lake Nipissing.
+Here, Dreuillettes learned much of the Unknown from an old Nipissing
+chief.  He heard of six overland routes to the bay of the North, whence
+came such store of peltry.[3]  He, too, like the two Frenchmen from
+Green Bay, heard of wandering tribes who had no settled lodge like the
+Hurons and Iroquois, but lived by the chase,&mdash;Crees and Sioux and
+Assiniboines of the prairie, at constant war round a lake called
+"Ouinipegouek."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-070"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-070.jpg" ALT="A Cree brave, with the wampum string." BORDER="2" WIDTH="202" HEIGHT="428">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: A Cree brave, with the wampum string.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+By one of those curious coincidences of destiny which mark the lives of
+nations and men, the young Frenchman who had gone with the Jesuit,
+Dreuillettes, to Lake Nipissing when the other Frenchmen turned back,
+was M�dard Chouart Groseillers, the fur trader married to Radisson's
+widowed sister, Marguerite.[4]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Radisson came back from Onondaga, he found his brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, at Three Rivers, with ambitious designs of exploration in
+the unknown land of which he had heard at Green Bay and on Lake
+Nipissing.  Jacques Cartier had discovered only one great river, had
+laid the foundations of only one small province; Champlain had only
+made the circuit of the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Great Lakes;
+but here was a country&mdash;if the Indians spoke the truth&mdash;greater than
+all the empires of Europe together, a country bounded only by three
+great seas, the Sea of the North, the Sea of the South, and the Sea of
+Japan, a country so vast as to stagger the utmost conception of little
+New France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was unnecessary for Groseillers to say more.  The ambition of young
+Radisson took fire.  Long ago, when a captive among the Mohawks, he had
+cherished boyish dreams that it was to be his "destiny to discover many
+wild nations"; and here was that destiny opening the door for him,
+pointing the way, beckoning to the toils and dangers and glories of the
+discoverer's life.  Radisson had been tortured among the Mohawks and
+besieged among the Onondagas.  Groseillers had been among the Huron
+missions that were destroyed and among the Algonquin canoes that were
+attacked.  Both explorers knew what perils awaited them; but what
+youthful blood ever chilled at prospect of danger when a single <I>coup</I>
+might win both wealth and fame?  Radisson had not been home one month;
+but he had no sooner heard the plan than he "longed to see himself in a
+boat."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A hundred and fifty Algonquins had come down the Ottawa from the Great
+Beyond shortly after Radisson returned from Onondaga.  Six of these
+Algonquins had brought their furs to Three Rivers.  Some emissaries had
+gone to Quebec to meet the governor; but the majority of the Indians
+remained at Montreal to avoid the ambuscade of the Mohawks on Lake St.
+Peter.  Radisson and Groseillers were not the only Frenchmen conspiring
+to wrest fame and fortune from the Upper Country.  When the Indians
+came back from Quebec, they were accompanied by thirty young French
+adventurers, gay as boys out of school or gold hunters before the first
+check to their plans.  There were also two Jesuits sent out to win the
+new domain for the cross.[5]  As ignorant as children of the hardships
+ahead, the other treasure-seekers kept up nonchalant boasting that
+roused the irony of such seasoned men as Radisson and Groseillers.
+"What fairer bastion than a good tongue," Radisson demands cynically,
+"especially when one sees his own chimney smoke?&#8230;  It is different
+when food is wanting, work necessary day and night, sleep taken on the
+bare ground or to mid-waist in water, with an empty stomach, weariness
+in the bones, and bad weather overhead."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Giving the slip to their noisy companions, Radisson and Groseillers
+stole out from Three Rivers late one night in June, accompanied by
+Algonquin guides.  Travelling only at night to avoid Iroquois spies,
+they came to Montreal in three days.  Here were gathered one hundred
+and forty Indians from the Upper Country, the thirty French, and the
+two priests.  No gun was fired at Montreal, lest the Mohawks should get
+wind of the departure; and the flotilla of sixty canoes spread over
+Lake St. Louis for the far venture of the <I>Pays d'en Haut</I>.  Three days
+of work had silenced the boasting of the gay adventurers; and the
+<I>voyageurs</I>, white and red, were now paddling in swift silence.  Safety
+engendered carelessness.  As the fleet seemed to be safe from Iroquois
+ambush, the canoes began to scatter.  Some loitered behind.  Hunters
+went ashore to shoot.  The hills began to ring with shot and call.  At
+the first <I>portage</I> many of the canoes were nine and ten miles apart.
+Enemies could have set on the Algonquins in some narrow defile and
+slaughtered the entire company like sheep in a pen.  Radisson and
+Groseillers warned the Indians of the risk they were running.  Many of
+these Algonquins had never before possessed firearms.  With the muskets
+obtained in trade at Three Rivers, they thought themselves invincible
+and laughed all warning to scorn.  Radisson and Groseillers were told
+that they were a pair of timid squaws; and the canoes spread apart till
+not twenty were within call.  As they skirted the wooded shores, a man
+suddenly dashed from the forest with an upraised war-hatchet in one
+hand and a blanket streaming from his shoulders.  He shouted for them
+to come to him.  The Algonquins were panic-stricken.  Was the man
+pursued by Mohawks, or laying a trap to lure them within shooting
+range?  Seeing them hesitate, the Indian threw down blanket and hatchet
+to signify that he was defenceless, and rushed into the water to his
+armpits.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I would save you," he shouted in Iroquois.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Algonquins did not understand.  They only knew that he spoke the
+tongue of the hated enemy and was unarmed.  In a trice, the Algonquins
+in the nearest canoe had thrown out a well-aimed lasso, roped the man
+round the waist, and drawn him a captive into the canoe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Brothers," protested the captive, who seems to have been either a
+Huron slave or an Iroquois magician, "your enemies are spread up and
+down!  Sleep not!  They have heard your noise!  They wait for you!
+They are sure of their prey!  Believe me&mdash;keep together!  Spend not
+your powder in vain to frighten your enemies by noise!  See that the
+stones of your arrows be not bent!  Bend your bows!  Keep your hatchets
+sharp!  Build a fort!  Make haste!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the Algonquins, intoxicated with the new power of firearms, would
+hear no warning.  They did not understand his words and refused to heed
+Radisson's interpretation.  Beating paddles on their canoes and firing
+off guns, they shouted derisively that the man was "a dog and a hen."
+All the same, they did not land to encamp that night, but slept in
+midstream, with their boats tied to the rushes or on the lee side of
+floating trees.  The French lost heart.  If this were the beginning,
+what of the end?  Daylight had scarcely broken when the paddles of the
+eager <I>voyageurs</I> were cutting the thick gray mist that rose from the
+river to get away from observation while the fog still hid the fleet.
+From afar came the dull, heavy rumble of a waterfall.[6]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a rush of the twelve foremost canoes to reach the landing and
+cross the <I>portage</I> before the thinning mist lifted entirely.  Twelve
+boats had got ashore when the fog was cleft by a tremendous crashing of
+guns, and Iroquois ambushed in the bordering forest let go a salute of
+musketry.  Everything was instantly in confusion.  Abandoning their
+baggage to the enemy, the Algonquins and French rushed for the woods to
+erect a barricade.  This would protect the landing of the other canoes.
+The Iroquois immediately threw up a defence of fallen logs likewise,
+and each canoe that came ashore was greeted with a cross fire between
+the two barricades.  Four canoes were destroyed and thirteen of the
+Indians from the Upper Country killed.  As day wore on, the Iroquois'
+shots ceased, and the Algonquins celebrated the truce by killing and
+devouring all the prisoners they had taken, among whom was the magician
+who had given them warning.  Radisson and Groseillers wondered if the
+Iroquois were reserving their powder for a night raid.  The Algonquins
+did not wait to know.  As soon as darkness fell, there was a wild
+scramble for the shore.  A long, low trumpet call, such as hunters use,
+signalled the Algonquins to rally and rush for the boats.  The French
+embarked as best they could.  The Indians swam and paddled for the
+opposite shore of the river.  Here, in the dark, hurried council was
+taken.  The most of the baggage had been lost.  The Indians refused to
+help either the Jesuits or the French, and it was impossible for the
+white <I>voyageurs</I> to keep up the pace in the dash across an unknown
+<I>portage</I> through the dark.  The French adventurers turned back for
+Montreal.  Of the white men, Radisson and Groseillers alone went on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Frightened into their senses by the encounter, the Algonquins now
+travelled only at night till they were far beyond range of the
+Iroquois.  All day the fugitive band lay hidden in the woods.  They
+could not hunt, lest Mohawk spies might hear the gunshots.  Provisions
+dwindled.  In a short time the food consisted of <I>tripe de roche</I>&mdash;a
+greenish moss boiled into a soup&mdash;and the few fish that might be caught
+during hurried nightly launch or morning landing.  Sometimes they hid
+in a berry patch, when the fruit was gathered and boiled, but
+camp-fires were stamped out and covered.  Turning westward, they
+crossed the barren region of iron-capped rocks and dwarf growth between
+the Upper Ottawa and the Great Lakes.  Now they were farther from the
+Iroquois, and staved off famine by shooting an occasional bear in the
+berry patches.  For a thousand miles they had travelled against stream,
+carrying their boats across sixty <I>portages</I>.  Now they glided with the
+current westward to Lake Nipissing.  On the lake, the Upper Indians
+always <I>cached</I> provisions.  Fish, otter, and beaver were plentiful;
+but again they refrained from using firearms, for Iroquois footprints
+had been found on the sand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From Lake Nipissing they passed to Lake Huron, where the fleet divided.
+Radisson and Groseillers went with the Indians, who crossed Lake Huron
+for Green Bay on Lake Michigan.  The birch canoes could not venture
+across the lake in storms; so the boats rounded southward, keeping
+along the shore of Georgian Bay.  Cedar forests clustered down the
+sandy reaches of the lake.  Rivers dark as cathedral aisles rolled
+their brown tides through the woods to the blue waters of Lake Huron.
+At one point Groseillers recognized the site of the ruined Jesuit
+missions.  The Indians waited the chance of a fair day, and paddled
+over to the straits at the entrance to Lake Michigan.  At Manitoulin
+Island were Huron refugees, among whom were, doubtless, the waiting
+families of the Indians with Radisson.  All struck south for Green Bay.
+So far Radisson and Groseillers had travelled over beaten ground.  Now
+they were at the gateway of the Great Beyond, where no white man had
+yet gone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The first thing done on taking up winter quarters on Green Bay was to
+appease the friends of those warriors slain by the Mohawks.  A
+distribution of gifts had barely dried up the tears of mourning when
+news came of Iroquois on the war-path.  Radisson did not wait for fear
+to unman the Algonquin warriors.  Before making winter camp, he offered
+to lead a band of volunteers against the marauders.  For two days he
+followed vague tracks through the autumn-tinted forests.  Here were
+markings of the dead leaves turned freshly up; there a moccasin print
+on the sand; and now the ashes of a hidden camp-fire lying in almost
+imperceptible powder on fallen logs told where the Mohawks had
+bivouacked.  On the third day Radisson caught the ambushed band
+unprepared, and fell upon the Iroquois so furiously that not one
+escaped.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After that the Indians of the Upper Country could not do too much for
+the white men.  Radisson and Groseillers were conducted from camp to
+camp in triumph.  Feasts were held.  Ambassadors went ahead with gifts
+from the Frenchmen; and companies of women marched to meet the
+explorers, chanting songs of welcome.  "But our mind was not to stay
+here," relates Radisson, "but to know the remotest people; and, because
+we had been willing to die in their defence, these Indians consented to
+conduct us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before the opening of spring, 1659, Radisson and Groseillers had been
+guided across what is now Wisconsin to "a mighty river, great, rushing,
+profound, and comparable to the St. Lawrence." [7]  On the shores of
+the river they found a vast nation&mdash;"the people of the fire," prairie
+tribes, a branch of the Sioux, who received them well.[8]  This river
+was undoubtedly the Upper Mississippi, now for the first time seen by
+white men.  Radisson and Groseillers had discovered the Great
+Northwest.[9]  They were standing on the threshold of the Great Beyond.
+They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed,
+not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a
+short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories.
+They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,&mdash;illimitable reaches of
+prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open
+meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon.  They saw a land
+waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire
+waiting for the nation builders.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-081"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-081.jpg" ALT="An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux." BORDER="2" WIDTH="401" HEIGHT="638">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+What were Radisson's thoughts?  Did he realize the importance of his
+discovery?  Could he have the vaguest premonition that he had opened a
+door of escape from stifled older lands to a higher type of manhood and
+freedom than the most sanguine dreamer had ever hoped?[10]  After an
+act has come to fruition, it is easy to read into the actor's mind
+fuller purpose than he could have intended.  Columbus could not have
+realized to what the discovery of America would lead.  Did Radisson
+realize what the discovery of the Great Northwest meant?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here is what he says, in that curious medley of idioms which so often
+results when a speaker knows many languages but is master of none:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The country was so pleasant, so beautiful, and so fruitful, that it
+grieved me to see that the world could not discover such inticing
+countries to live in.  This, I say, because the Europeans fight for a
+rock in the sea against one another, or for a steril land&nbsp;&#8230;  where
+the people by changement of air engender sickness and die.&#8230;
+Contrariwise, these kingdoms are so delicious and under so temperate a
+climate, plentiful of all things, and the earth brings forth its fruit
+twice a year, that the people live long and lusty and wise in their
+way.  What a conquest would this be, at little or no cost?  What
+pleasure should people have&nbsp;&#8230; instead of misery and poverty!  Why
+should not men reap of the love of God here?  Surely, more is to be
+gained converting souls here than in differences of creed, when wrongs
+are committed under pretence of religion!&#8230;  It is true, I
+confess,&nbsp;&#8230; that access here is difficult&nbsp;&#8230; but nothing is to be
+gained without labor and pains." [11]
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-083"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-083.jpg" ALT="Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in Montreal by Mr. McNab.  The date on the picture is 1669." BORDER="2" WIDTH="345" HEIGHT="400">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in<BR>
+Montreal by Mr. McNab.  The date on the picture is 1669.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Here Radisson foreshadows all the best gains that the West has
+accomplished for the human race.  What are they?  Mainly room,&mdash;room to
+live and room for opportunity; equal chances for all classes, high and
+low; plenty for all classes, high and low; the conquests not of war but
+of peace.  The question arises,&mdash;when Radisson discovered the Great
+Northwest ten years before Marquette and Jolliet, twenty years before
+La Salle, a hundred years before De la V�rendrye, why has his name been
+slurred over and left in oblivion?[12]  The reasons are plain.
+Radisson was a Christian, but he was not a slave to any creed.  Such
+liberality did not commend itself to the annalists of an age that was
+still rioting in a very carnival of religious persecution.  Radisson
+always invoked the blessing of Heaven on his enterprises and rendered
+thanks for his victories; but he was indifferent as to whether he was
+acting as lay helper with the Jesuits, or allied to the Huguenots of
+London and Boston.  His discoveries were too important to be ignored by
+the missionaries.  They related his discoveries, but refrained from
+mentioning his name, though twice referring to Groseillers.  What hurt
+Radisson's fame even more than his indifference to creeds was his
+indifference to nationality.  Like Columbus, he had little care what
+flag floated at the prow, provided only that the prow pushed on and on
+and on,&mdash;into the Unknown.  He sold his services alternately to France
+and England till he had offended both governments; and, in addition to
+withstanding a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Church, his
+fame encountered the ill-will of state historians.  He is mentioned as
+"the adventurer," "the hang-dog," "the renegade."  Only in 1885, when
+the manuscript of his travels was rescued from oblivion, did it become
+evident that history must be rewritten.  Here was a man whose
+discoveries were second only to those of Columbus, and whose
+explorations were more far-ranging and important than those of
+Champlain and La Salle and De la V�rendrye put together.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The spring of 1659 found the explorers still among the prairie tribes
+of the Mississippi.  From these people Radisson learned of four other
+races occupying vast, undiscovered countries.  He heard of the Sioux, a
+warlike nation to the west, who had no fixed abode but lived by the
+chase and were at constant war with another nomadic tribe to the
+north&mdash;the Crees.  The Crees spent the summer time round the shores of
+salt water, and in winter came inland to hunt.  Between these two was a
+third,&mdash;the Assiniboines,&mdash;who used earthen pots for cooking, heated
+their food by throwing hot stones in water, and dressed themselves in
+buckskin.  These three tribes were wandering hunters; but the people of
+the fire told Radisson of yet another nation, who lived in villages
+like the Iroquois, on "a great river that divided itself in two," and
+was called "the Forked River," because "it had two branches, the one
+toward the west, the other toward the south,&nbsp;&#8230; toward Mexico."
+These people were the Mandans or Omahas, or Iowas, or other people of
+the Missouri.[13]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A whole world of discoveries lay before them.  In what direction should
+they go?  "We desired not to go to the north till we had made a
+discovery in the south," explains Radisson.  The people of the fire
+refused to accompany the explorers farther; so the two "put themselves
+in hazard," as Radisson relates, and set out alone.  They must have
+struck across the height of land between the Mississippi and the
+Missouri; for Radisson records that they met several nations having
+villages, "all amazed to see us and very civil.  The farther we
+sojourned, the delightfuller the land became.  I can say that in all my
+lifetime I have never seen a finer country, for all that I have been in
+Italy.  The people have very long hair.  They reap twice a year.  They
+war against the Sioux and the Cree.&#8230;  It was very hot there.&#8230;
+Being among the people they told us&nbsp;&#8230; of men that built great
+cabins and have beards and have knives like the French."  The Indians
+showed Radisson a string of beads only used by Europeans.  These people
+must have been the Spaniards of the south.  The tribes on the Missouri
+were large men of well-formed figures.  There were no deformities among
+the people.  Radisson saw corn and pumpkins in their gardens.  "Their
+arrows were not of stone, but of fish bones.&#8230;  Their dishes were
+made of wood.&#8230;  They had great calumets of red and green
+stone&nbsp;&#8230; and great store of tobacco.&#8230;  They had a kind of drink
+that made them mad for a whole day." [14]  "We had not yet seen the
+Sioux," relates Radisson.  "We went toward the south and came back by
+the north."  The <I>Jesuit Relations</I> are more explicit.  Written the
+year that Radisson returned to Quebec, they state: "Continuing their
+wanderings, our two young Frenchmen visited the Sioux, where they found
+five thousand warriors.  They then left this nation for another warlike
+people, who with bows and arrows had rendered themselves redoubtable."
+These were the Crees, with whom, say the Jesuits, wood is so rare and
+small that nature has taught them to make fire of a kind of coal and to
+cover their cabins with skins of the chase.  The explorers seem to have
+spent the summer hunting antelope, buffalo, moose, and wild turkey.
+The Sioux received them cordially, supplied them with food, and gave
+them an escort to the next encampments.  They had set out southwest to
+the Mascoutins, Mandans, and perhaps, also, the Omahas.  They were now
+circling back northeastward toward the Sault between Lake Michigan and
+Lake Superior.  How far westward had they gone?  Only two facts gave
+any clew.  Radisson reports that mountains lay far inland; and the
+Jesuits record that the explorers were among tribes that used coal.
+This must have been a country far west of the Mandans and Mascoutins
+and within sight of at least the Bad Lands, or that stretch of rough
+country between the prairie and outlying foothills of the Rockies.[15]
+The course of the first exploration seems to have circled over the
+territory now known as Wisconsin, perhaps eastern Iowa and Nebraska,
+South Dakota, Montana, and back over North Dakota and Minnesota to the
+north shore of Lake Superior.  "The lake toward the north is full of
+rocks, yet great ships can ride in it without danger," writes Radisson.
+At the Sault they found the Crees and Sautaux in bitter war.  They also
+heard of a French establishment, and going to visit it found that the
+Jesuits had established a mission.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson had explored the Southwest.  He now decided to essay the
+Northwest.  When the Sautaux were at war with the Crees, he met the
+Crees and heard of the great salt sea in the north.  Surely this was
+the Sea of the North&mdash;Hudson Bay&mdash;of which the Nipissing chief had told
+Groseillers long ago.  Then the Crees had great store of beaver pelts;
+and trade must not be forgotten.  No sooner had peace been arranged
+between Sautaux and Crees, than Cree hunters flocked out of the
+northern forests to winter on Lake Superior.  A rumor of Iroquois on
+the war-path compelled Radisson and Groseillers to move their camp back
+from Lake Superior higher up the chain of lakes and rivers between what
+is now Minnesota and Canada, toward the country of the Sioux.  In the
+fall of 1659 Groseillers' health began to fail from the hardships; so
+he remained in camp for the winter, attending to the trade, while
+Radisson carried on the explorations alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This was one of the coldest winters known in Canada.[16]  The snow fell
+so heavily in the thick pine woods of Minnesota that Radisson says the
+forest became as sombre as a cellar.  The colder the weather the better
+the fur, and, presenting gifts to insure safe conduct, Radisson set out
+with a band of one hundred and fifty Cree hunters for the Northwest.
+They travelled on snow-shoes, hunting moose on the way and sleeping at
+night round a camp-fire under the stars.  League after league, with no
+sound through the deathly white forest but the soft crunch-crunch of
+the snowshoes, they travelled two hundred miles toward what is now
+Manitoba.  When they had set out, the snow was like a cushion.  Now it
+began to melt in the spring sun, and clogged the snow-shoes till it was
+almost impossible to travel.  In the morning the surface was glazed
+ice, and they could march without snow-shoes.  Spring thaw called a
+halt to their exploration.  The Crees encamped for three weeks to build
+boats.  As soon as the ice cleared, the band launched back down-stream
+for the appointed rendezvous on Green Bay.  All that Radisson learned
+on this trip was that the Bay of the North lay much farther from Lake
+Superior than the old Nipissing chief had told Dreuillettes and
+Groseillers.[17]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Groseillers had all in readiness to depart for Quebec; and five hundred
+Indians from the Upper Country had come together to go down the Ottawa
+and St. Lawrence with the explorers.  As they were about to embark,
+<I>coureurs</I> came in from the woods with news that more than a thousand
+Iroquois were on the war-path, boasting that they would exterminate the
+French.[18]  Somewhere along the Ottawa a small band of Hurons had been
+massacred.  The Indians with Groseillers and Radisson were terrified.
+A council of the elders was called.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Brothers, why are ye so foolish as to put yourselves in the hands of
+those that wait for you?" demanded an old chief, addressing the two
+white men.  "The Iroquois will destroy you and carry you away captive.
+Will you have your brethren, that love you, slain?  Who will baptize
+our children?"  (Radisson and Groseillers had baptized more than two
+hundred children.[19])  "Stay till next year!  Then you may freely go!
+Our mothers will send their children to be taught in the way of the
+Lord!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fear is like fire.  It must be taken in the beginning, or it spreads.
+The explorers retired, decided on a course of action, and requested the
+Indians to meet them in council a second time.  Eight hundred warriors
+assembled, seating themselves in a circle.  Radisson and Groseillers
+took their station in the centre.[20]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who am I?" demanded Groseillers, hotly.  "Am I a foe or a friend?  If
+a foe, why did you suffer me to live?  If a friend, listen what I say!
+You know that we risked our lives for you!  If we have no courage, why
+did you not tell us?  If you have more wit than we, why did you not use
+it to defend yourselves against the Iroquois?  How can you defend your
+wives and children unless you get arms from the French!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Fools," cried Radisson, striking a beaver skin across an Indian's
+shoulder, "will you fight the Iroquois with beaver pelts?  Do you not
+know the French way?  We fight with guns, not robes.  The Iroquois will
+coop you up here till you have used all your powder, and then despatch
+you with ease!  Shall your children be slaves because you are cowards?
+Do what you will!  For my part I choose to die like a man rather than
+live like a beggar.  Take back your beaver robes.  We can live without
+you&mdash;" and the white men strode out from the council.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Consternation reigned among the Indians.  There was an uproar of
+argument.  For six days the fate of the white men hung fire.  Finally
+the chiefs sent word that the five hundred young warriors would go to
+Quebec with the white men.  Radisson did not give their ardor time to
+cool.  They embarked at once.  The fleet of canoes crossed the head of
+the lakes and came to the Upper Ottawa without adventure.  Scouts went
+ahead to all the <I>portages</I>, and great care was taken to avoid an
+ambush when passing overland.  Below the Chaudi�re Falls the scouts
+reported that four Iroquois boats had crossed the river.  Again
+Radisson did not give time for fear.  He sent the lightest boats in
+pursuit; and while keeping the enemy thus engaged with half his own
+company on guard at the ends of the long <I>portage</I>, he hurriedly got
+cargoes and canoes across the landing.  The Iroquois had fled.  By that
+Radisson knew they were weak.  Somewhere along the Long Sault Rapids,
+the scouts saw sixteen Iroquois canoes.  The Indians would have thrown
+down their goods and fled, but Radisson instantly got his forces in
+hand and held them with a grip of steel.  Distributing loaded muskets
+to the bravest warriors, he pursued the Iroquois with a picked company
+of Hurons, Algonquins, Sautaux, and Sioux.  Beating their paddles,
+Radisson's company shouted the war-cry till the hills rang; but all the
+warriors were careful not to waste an ounce of powder till within
+hitting range.  The Iroquois were not used to this sort of defence.
+They fled.  The Long Sault was always the most dangerous part of the
+Ottawa.  Radisson kept scouts to rear and fore, but the Iroquois had
+deserted their boats and were hanging on the flanks of the company to
+attempt an ambush.  It was apparent that a fort had been erected at the
+foot of the rapids.  Leaving half the band in their boats, Radisson
+marched overland with two hundred warriors.  Iroquois shots spattered
+from each side; but the Huron muskets kept the assailants at a
+distance, and those of Radisson's warriors who had not guns were armed
+with bows and arrows, and wore a shield of buffalo skin dried hard as
+metal.  The Iroquois rushed for the barricade at the foot of the Sault.
+Five of them were picked off as they ran.  For a moment the Iroquois
+were out of cover, and their weakness was betrayed.  They had only one
+hundred and fifty men, while Radisson had five hundred; but the odds
+would not long be in his favor.  Ammunition was running out, and the
+enemy must be dislodged without wasting a shot.  Radisson called back
+encouragement to his followers.  They answered with a shout.  Tying the
+beaver pelts in great bundles, the Indians rolled the fur in front
+nearer and nearer the Iroquois boats, keeping under shelter from the
+shots of the fort.  The Iroquois must either lose their boats and be
+cut off from escape, or retire from the fort.  It was not necessary for
+Radisson's warriors to fire a shot.  Abandoning even their baggage and
+glad to get off with their lives, the Iroquois dashed to save their
+boats.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-095"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-095.jpg" ALT="Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River." BORDER="2" WIDTH="300" HEIGHT="200">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+A terrible spectacle awaited Radisson inside the enclosure of the
+palisades.[21]  The scalps of dead Indians flaunted from the pickets.
+Not a tree but was spattered with bullet marks as with bird shot.  Here
+and there burnt holes gaped in the stockades like wounds.  Outside
+along the river bank lay the charred bones of captives who had been
+burned.  The scarred fort told its own tale.  Here refugees had been
+penned up by the Iroquois till thirst and starvation did their work.
+In the clay a hole had been dug for water by the parched victims, and
+the ooze through the mud eagerly scooped up.  Only when he reached
+Montreal did Radisson learn the story of the dismantled fort.  The
+rumor carried to the explorers on Lake Michigan of a thousand Iroquois
+going on the war-path to exterminate the French had been only too true.
+Half the warriors were to assault Quebec, half to come down on Montreal
+from the Ottawa.  One thing only could save the French&mdash;to keep the
+bands apart.  Those on the Ottawa had been hunting all winter and must
+necessarily be short of powder.  To intercept them, a gallant band of
+seventeen French, four Algonquins, and sixty Hurons led by Dollard took
+their stand at the Long Sault.  The French and their Indian allies were
+boiling their kettles when two hundred Iroquois broke from the woods.
+There was no time to build a fort.  Leaving their food, Dollard and his
+men threw themselves into the rude palisades which Indians had erected
+the previous year.  The Iroquois kept up a constant fire and sent for
+reinforcements of six hundred warriors, who were on the Richelieu.  In
+defiance the Indians fighting for the French sallied out, scalped the
+fallen Iroquois, and hoisted the sanguinary trophies on long poles
+above the pickets.  The enraged Iroquois redoubled their fury.  The
+fort was too small to admit all the Hurons; and when the Iroquois came
+up from the Richelieu with Huron renegades among their warriors, the
+Hurons deserted their French allies and went over in a body to the
+enemy.  For two days the French had fought against two hundred
+Iroquois.  For five more days they fought against eight hundred.  "The
+worst of it was," relates Radisson, "the French had no water, as we
+plainly saw; for they had made a hole in the ground out of which they
+could get but little because the fort was on a hill.  It was pitiable.
+There was not a tree but what was shot with bullets.  The Iroquois had
+rushed to make a breach (in the wall).&#8230; The French set fire to a
+barrel of powder to drive the Iroquois back&nbsp;&#8230; but it fell inside
+the fort.&#8230; Upon this, the Iroquois entered&nbsp;&#8230; so that not one
+of the French escaped.&#8230;  It was terrible&nbsp;&#8230; for we came there
+eight days after the defeat." [22]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Without a doubt it was Dollard's splendid fight that put fear in the
+hearts of the Iroquois who fled before Radisson.  The passage to
+Montreal was clear.  The boats ran the rapids without unloading; but
+Groseillers almost lost his life.  His canoe caught on a rock in
+midstream, but righting herself shot down safely to the landing with no
+greater loss than a damaged keel.  The next day, after two years'
+absence, Radisson and Groseillers arrived at Montreal.  A brief stop
+was made at Three Rivers for rest till twenty citizens had fitted out
+two shallops with cannon to escort the discoverers in fitting pomp to
+Quebec.  As the fleet of canoes glided round Cape Diamond, battery and
+bastion thundered a welcome.  Welcome they were, and thrice welcome;
+for so ceaseless had been the Iroquois wars that the three French ships
+lying at anchor would have returned to France without a single beaver
+skin if the explorers had not come.  Citizens shouted from the terraced
+heights of Ch�teau St. Louis, and bells rang out the joy of all New
+France over the discoverers' return.  For a week Radisson and
+Groseillers were f�ted.  Viscomte d'Argenson, the new governor,
+presented them with gifts and sent two brigantines to carry them home
+to Three Rivers.  There they rested for the remainder of the year,
+Groseillers at his seigniory with his wife, Marguerite; Radisson, under
+the parental roof.[23]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] Mr. Benjamin Sulte establishes this date as 1634.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] See <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, 1656-57-58.  I have purposely refrained
+from entering into the heated controversy as to the identity of these
+two men.  It is apart from the subject, as there is no proof these men
+went beyond the Green Bay region.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] These routes were; (1) By the Saguenay, (2) by Three Rivers and the
+St. Maurice, (3) by Lake Nipissing, (4) by Lake Huron, through the land
+of the Sautaux, (5) by Lake Superior overland, (6) by the Ottawa.  See
+<I>Jesuit Relations</I> for detailed accounts of these routes.  Dreuillettes
+went farther west to the Crees a few years later, but that does not
+concern this narrative.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[4] The dispute as to whether eastern Minnesota was discovered on the
+1654-55-56 trip, and whether Groseillers discovered it, is a point for
+savants, but will, I think, remain an unsettled dispute.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[5] The <I>Relations</I> do not give the names of these two Jesuits,
+probably owing to the fact that the enterprise failed.  They simply
+state that two priests set out, but were compelled to remain behind
+owing to the caprice of the savages.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[6] Whether they were now on the Ottawa or the St. Lawrence, it is
+impossible to tell.  Dr. Dionne thinks that the band went overland from
+Lake Ontario to Lake Huron.  I know both waters&mdash;Lake Ontario and the
+Ottawa&mdash;from many trips, and I think Radisson's description here
+tallies with his other descriptions of the Ottawa.  It is certain that
+they must have been on the Ottawa before they came to the Lake of the
+Castors or Nipissing.  The noise of the waterfall seems to point to the
+Chaudi�re Falls of the Ottawa.  If so, the landing place would be the
+tongue of land running out from Hull, opposite the city of Ottawa, and
+the <I>portage</I> would be the Aylmer Road beyond the rapids above the
+falls.  Mr. Benjamin Sulte, the scholarly historian, thinks they went
+by way of the Ottawa, not Lake Ontario, as the St. Lawrence route was
+not used till 1702.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[7] <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, 1660.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[8] <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, 1660, and <I>Radisson's Journal</I>.  These "people
+of the fire," or Mascoutins, were in three regions, (1) Wisconsin, (2)
+Nebraska, (3) on the Missouri.  See Appendix E.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[9] Benjamin Sulte unequivocally states that the river was the
+Mississippi.  Of writers contemporaneous with Radisson, the Jesuits,
+Marie de l'Incarnation, and Charlevoix corroborate Radisson's account.
+In the face of this, what are we to think of modern writers with a
+reputation to lose, who brush Radisson's exploits aside as a possible
+fabrication?  The only conclusion is that they have not read his
+<I>Journal</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[10] I refer to Radisson alone, because for half the time in 1659
+Groseillers was ill at the lake, and we cannot be sure that he
+accompanied Radisson in all the journeys south and west, though
+Radisson generously always includes him as "we."  Besides, Groseillers
+seems to have attended to the trading, Radisson to the exploring.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[11] If any one cares to render Radisson's peculiar jumble of French,
+English, Italian, and Indian idioms into more intelligent form, they
+may try their hand at it.  His meaning is quite clear; but the words
+are a medley.  The passage is to be found on pp. 150-151, of the
+<I>Prince Society Reprint</I>.  See also <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, 1660.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[12] It will be noted that what I claim for Radisson is the honor of
+discovering the Great Northwest, and refrain from trying to identify
+his movements with the modern place names of certain states.  I have
+done this intentionally&mdash;though it would have been easy to advance
+opinions about Green Bay, Fox River, and the Wisconsin, and so become
+involved in the childish quarrel that has split the western historical
+societies and obscured the main issue of Radisson's feat.  Needless to
+say, the world does not care whether Radisson went by way of the
+Menominee, or snow-shoed across country.  The question is: Did he reach
+the Mississippi Valley before Marquette and Jolliet and La Salle?  That
+question this chapter answers.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[13] I have refrained from quoting Radisson's names for the different
+Indian tribes because it would only be "caviare to the general."  If
+Radisson's manuscript be consulted it will be seen that the crucial
+point is the whereabouts of the Mascoutins&mdash;or people of the fire.
+Reference to the last part of Appendix E will show that these people
+extended far beyond the Wisconsin to the Missouri.  It is ignorance of
+this fact that has created such bitter and childish controversy about
+the exact direction taken by Radisson west-north-west of the
+Mascoutins.  The exact words of the document in the Marine Department
+are; "In the lower Missipy there are several other nations very
+numerous with whom we have no commerce who are trading yet with nobody.
+Above Missoury river which is in the Mississippi below the river
+Illinois, to the south, there are the Mascoutins, Nadoessioux (Sioux)
+with whom we trade and who are numerous."  Benjamin Sulte was one of
+the first to discover that the Mascoutins had been in Nebraska, though
+he does not attempt to trace this part of Radisson's journey definitely.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[14] The entire account of the people on "the Forked River" is so exact
+an account of the Mandans that it might be a page from Catlin's
+descriptions two centuries later.  The long hair, the two crops a year,
+the tobacco, the soap-stone calumets, the stationary villages, the
+knowledge of the Spaniards, the warm climate&mdash;all point to a region far
+south of the Northern States, to which so many historians have stupidly
+and with almost wilful ignorance insisted on limiting Radisson's
+travels.  Parkman has been thoroughly honest in the matter.  His <I>La
+Salle</I> had been written before the discovery of the <I>Radisson
+Journals</I>; but in subsequent editions he acknowledges in a footnote
+that Radisson had been to "the Forked River."  Other writers (with the
+exception of five) have been content to quote from Radisson's enemies
+instead of going directly to his journals.  Even Garneau slurs over
+Radisson's explorations; but Garneau, too, wrote before the discovery
+of the Radisson papers.  Abb� Tanguay, who is almost infallible on
+French-Canadian matters, slips up on Radisson, because his writings
+preceded the publication of the <I>Radisson Relations</I>.  The five writers
+who have attempted to redeem Radisson's memory from ignominy are: Dr.
+N. E. Dionne, of the Parliamentary Library, Quebec; Mr. Justice
+Prudhomme, of St. Boniface, Manitoba; Dr. George Bryce, of Winnepeg,
+Mr. Benjamin Sulte, of Ottawa; and Judge J. V. Brower, of St. Paul.  It
+ever a monument be erected to Radisson&mdash;as one certainly ought in every
+province and state west of the Great Lakes&mdash;the names of these four
+champions should be engraved upon it.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[15] This claim will, I know, stagger preconceived ideas.  In the light
+of only Radisson's narrative, the third voyage has usually been
+identified with Wisconsin and Minnesota; but in the light of the
+<I>Jesuit Relations</I>, written the year that Radisson returned, to what
+tribes could the descriptions apply?  Even Parkman's footnote
+acknowledged that Radisson was among the people of the Missouri.  Grant
+that, and the question arises, What people on the Missouri answer the
+description?  The Indians of the far west use not only coal for fire,
+but raw galena to make bullets for their guns.  In fact, it was that
+practice of the tribes of Idaho that led prospectors to find the Blue
+Bell Mine of Kootenay.  Granting that the Jesuit account&mdash;which was of
+course, from hearsay&mdash;mistook the use of turf, dry grass, or buffalo
+refuse for a kind of coal, the fact remains that only the very far
+western tribes had this custom.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[16] <I>Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[17] <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, 1658.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[18] See Marie de l'Incarnation, Dollier de Casson, and Abb� Belmont.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[19] <I>Jesuit Relations</I>, 1660.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[20] It may be well to state as nearly as possible exactly <I>what</I>
+tribes Radisson had met in this trip.  Those rejoined on the way up at
+Manitoulin Island were refugee Hurons and Ottawas.  From the Hurons,
+Ottawas, and Algonquins of Green Bay, Radisson went west with
+Pottowatomies, from them to the Escotecke or Sioux of the Fire, namely
+a branch of the Mascoutins.  From these Wisconsin Mascoutins, he learns
+of the Nadoneceroron, or Sioux proper, and of the Christinos or Crees.
+Going west with the Mascoutins, he comes to "sedentary" tribes.  Are
+these the Mandans?  He compares this country to Italy.  From them he
+hears of white men, that he thinks may be Spaniards.  This tribe is at
+bitter war with Sioux and Crees.  At Green Bay he hears of the Sautaux
+in war with Crees.  His description of buffalo hunts among the Sioux
+tallies exactly with the Pembina hunts of a later day.  Oldmixon says
+that it was from Crees and Assiniboines visiting at Green Bay that
+Radisson learned of a way overland to the great game country of Hudson
+Bay.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[21] There is a mistake in Radisson's account here, which is easily
+checked by contemporaneous accounts of Marie de l'Incarnation and
+Dollier de Casson.  Radisson describes Dollard's fight during his
+fourth trip in 1664, when it is quite plain that he means 1660.  The
+fight has been so thoroughly described by Mr. Parkman, who drew his
+material from the two authorities mentioned, and the <I>Jesuit Relations</I>
+that I do not give it in detail.  I give a brief account of Radisson's
+description of the tragedy.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[22] It will be noticed that Radisson's account of the battle at the
+Long Sault&mdash;which I have given in his own words as far as
+possible&mdash;differs in details from the only other accounts written by
+contemporaries; namely, Marie de l'Incarnation, Dollier de Casson, the
+Abb� Belmont, and the Jesuits.  All these must have written from
+hearsay, for they were at Quebec and Montreal.  Radisson was on the
+spot a week after the tragedy; so that his account may be supposed to
+be as accurate as any.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[23] Mr. Benjamin Sulte states that the explorers wintered on Green
+Bay, 1658-1659, then visited the tribes between Milwaukee and the river
+Wisconsin in the spring of 1659.  Here they learn of the Sioux and the
+Crees.  They push southwest first, where they see the Mississippi
+between April and July, 1659.  Thence they come back to the Sault.
+Then they winter, 1659-1660, among the Sioux.  I have not attempted to
+give the dates of the itinerary; because it would be a matter of
+speculation open to contradiction; but if we accept Radisson's account
+at all&mdash;and that account is corroborated by writers contemporaneous
+with him&mdash;we must then accept <I>his</I> account of <I>where</I> he went, and not
+the casual guesses of modern writers who have given his journal one
+hurried reading, and then sat down, without consulting documents
+contemporaneous with Radisson, to inform the world of <I>where</I> he went.
+Because this is such a very sore point with two or three western
+historical societies, I beg to state the reasons why I have set down
+Radisson's itinerary as much farther west than has been generally
+believed, though how far west he went does not efface the main and
+essential fact <I>that Radisson was the true discoverer of the Great
+Northwest</I>.  For that, let us give him a belated credit and not obscure
+the feat by disputes.  (l) The term "Forked River" referred to the
+Missouri and Mississippi, not the Wisconsin and Mississippi.  (2) No
+other rivers in that region are to be compared to the Ottawa and St.
+Lawrence but the Missouri and Mississippi.  (3) The Mascoutins, or
+People of the Fire, among whom Radisson found himself when he descended
+the Wisconsin from Green Bay, conducted him westward only as far as the
+tribes allied to them, the Mascoutins of the Missouri or Nebraska.
+Hence, Radisson going west-north-west to the Sioux&mdash;as he says he
+did&mdash;must have skirted much farther west than Wisconsin and Minnesota.
+(4) His descriptions of the Indians who knew tribes in trade with the
+Spaniards must refer to the Indians south of the Big Bend of the
+Missouri.  (5) His description of the climate refers to the same
+region.  (6) The <I>Jesuit Relations</I> confirm beyond all doubt that he
+was among the main body of the great Sioux Confederacy.  (7) Both his
+and the Jesuit reference is to the treeless prairie, which does not
+apply to the wooded lake regions of eastern Minnesota or northern
+Wisconsin.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+To me, it is simply astounding&mdash;and that is putting it mildly&mdash;that any
+one pretending to have read <I>Radisson's Journal</I> can accuse him of
+"claiming" to have "descended to the salt sea" (Gulf of Mexico).
+Radisson makes no such claim; and to accuse him of such is like
+building a straw enemy for the sake of knocking him down, or stirring
+up muddy waters to make them look deep.  The exact words of Radisson's
+narrative are: "We went into ye great river that divides itself in 2,
+where the hurrons with some Ottauake&nbsp;&#8230; had retired.&#8230;  This
+nation have warrs against those of the Forked River&nbsp;&#8230; so called
+because it has l branches the one towards the west, the other towards
+the South, wch. we believe runns towards Mexico, by the tokens they
+gave us&nbsp;&#8230; they told us the prisoners they take tells them that they
+have warrs against a nation&nbsp;&#8230; that have great beards and such
+knives as we have"&nbsp;&#8230; etc., etc., etc.&#8230; "which made us believe
+they were Europeans."  This statement is <I>no</I> claim that Radisson went
+to Mexico, but only that he met tribes who knew tribes trading with
+Spaniards of Mexico.  And yet, on the careless reading of this
+statement, one historian brands Radisson as a liar for "having claimed
+he went to Mexico."  The thing would be comical in its impudence if it
+were not that many such misrepresentations of what Radisson wrote have
+dimmed the glory of his real achievements.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1661-1664
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RADISSON'S FOURTH VOYAGE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Success of the Explorers arouses Envy&mdash;It becomes known that they
+have heard of the Famous Sea of the North&mdash;When they ask Permission to
+resume their Explorations, the French Governor refuses except on
+Condition of receiving Half the Profits&mdash;In Defiance, the Explorers
+steal off at Midnight&mdash;They return with a Fortune and are driven from
+New France
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Radisson was not yet twenty-six years of age, and his explorations of
+the Great Northwest had won him both fame and fortune.  As Spain sought
+gold in the New Word, so France sought precious furs.  Furs were the
+only possible means of wealth to the French colony, and for ten years
+the fur trade had languished owing to the Iroquois wars.  For a year
+after the migration of the Hurons to Onondaga, not a single beaver skin
+was brought to Montreal.  Then began the annual visits of the Indians
+from the Upper Country to the forts of the St. Lawrence.  Sweeping down
+the northern rivers like wild-fowl, in far-spread, desultory flocks,
+came the Indians of the <I>Pays d'en Haut</I>.  Down the Ottawa to Montreal,
+down the St. Maurice to Three Rivers, down the Saguenay and round to
+Quebec, came the treasure-craft,&mdash;light fleets of birch canoes laden to
+the water-line with beaver skins.  Whence came the wealth that revived
+the languishing trade of New France?  From a vague, far Eldorado
+somewhere round a sea in the North.  Hudson had discovered this sea
+half a century before Radisson's day; Jean Bourdon, a Frenchman, had
+coasted up Labrador in 1657 seeking the Bay of the North; and on their
+last trip the explorers had learned from the Crees who came through the
+dense forests of the hinterland that there lay round this Bay of the
+North a vast country with untold wealth of furs.  The discovery of a
+route overland to the north sea was to become the lodestar of
+Radisson's life.[1]
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-101"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-101.jpg" ALT="Montreal in 1760" BORDER="2" WIDTH="522" HEIGHT="430">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Montreal in 1760: 1, the St. Lawrence; 20, the Dock;
+18-19, Arsenal; 16, <BR>
+the Church; 13-15, the Convent and Hospital; 8-12,
+Sally-ports, River Side; 17, <BR>
+Cannon and Wall; 3-4-5, Houses on Island.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+"We considered whether to reveal what we had learned," explains
+Radisson, "for we had <I>not</I> been in the Bay of the North, knowing only
+what the Crees told us.  We wished to discover it ourselves and have
+assurance before revealing anything."  But the secret leaked out.
+Either Groseillers told his wife, or the Jesuits got wind of the news
+from the Indians; for it was announced from Quebec that two priests,
+young La Valli�re, the son of the governor at Three Rivers, six other
+Frenchmen, and some Indians would set out for the Bay of the North up
+the Saguenay.  Radisson was invited to join the company as a guide.
+Needless to say that a man who had already discovered the Great
+Northwest and knew the secret of the road to the North, refused to play
+a second part among amateur explorers.  Radisson promptly declined.
+Nevertheless, in May, 1661, the Jesuits, Gabriel Dreuillettes and
+Claude Dablon, accompanied by Couture, La Valli�re, and three others,
+set out with Indian guides for the discovery of Hudson's Bay by land.
+On June 1 they began to ascend the Saguenay, pressing through vast
+solitudes below the sombre precipices of the river.  The rapids were
+frequent, the heat was terrific, and the <I>portages</I> arduous.  Owing to
+the obstinacy of the guides, the French were stopped north of Lake St.
+John.  Here the priests established a mission, and messengers were sent
+to Quebec for instructions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, Radisson and Groseillers saw that no time must be lost.  If
+they would be first in the North, as they had been first in the West,
+they must set out at once.  Two Indian guides from the Upper Country
+chanced to be in Montreal.  Groseillers secured them by bringing both
+to Three Rivers.  Then the explorers formally applied to the French
+governor, D'Avaugour, for permission to go on the voyage of discovery.
+New France regulated the fur trade by license.  Imprisonment, the
+galleys for life, even death on a second offence, were the punishments
+of those who traded without a license.  The governor's answer revealed
+the real animus behind his enthusiasm for discovery.  He would give the
+explorers a license if they would share half the profits of the trip
+with him and take along two of his servants as auditors of the returns.
+One can imagine the indignation of the dauntless explorers at this
+answer.  Their cargo of furs the preceding year had saved New France
+from bankruptcy.  Offering to venture their lives a second time for the
+extension of the French domain, they were told they might do so if they
+would share half the profits with an avaricious governor.  Their answer
+was characteristic.  Discoverers were greater than governors; still, if
+the Indians of the Upper Country invited his Excellency, Radisson and
+Groseillers would be glad to have the honor of his company; as for his
+servants&mdash;men who went on voyages of discovery had to act as both
+masters and servants.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+D'Avaugour was furious.  He issued orders forbidding the explorers to
+leave Three Rivers without his express permission.  Radisson and
+Groseillers knew the penalties of ignoring this order.  They asked the
+Jesuits to intercede for them.  Though Gareau had been slain trying to
+ascend the Ottawa and Father M�nard had by this time preached in the
+forests of Lake Michigan, the Jesuits had made no great discoveries in
+the Northwest.  All they got for their intercessions was a snub.[2]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While messages were still passing between the governor and the
+explorers, there swept down the St. Lawrence to Three Rivers seven
+canoes of Indians from the Upper Country, asking for Radisson and
+Groseillers.  The explorers were honorable to a degree.  They notified
+the governor of Quebec that they intended to embark with the Indians.
+D'Avaugour stubbornly ordered the Indians to await the return of his
+party from the Saguenay.  The Indians made off to hide in the rushes of
+Lake St. Peter.  The sympathy of Three Rivers was with the explorers.
+Late one night in August Radisson and Groseillers&mdash;who was captain of
+the soldiers and carried the keys of the fort&mdash;slipped out from the
+gates, with a third Frenchman called Larivi�re.  As they stepped into
+their canoe, the sentry demanded, "Who goes?"  "Groseillers," came the
+answer through the dark.  "God give you a good voyage, sir," called the
+sentry, faithful to his captain rather than the governor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The skiff pushed out on the lapping tide.  A bend in the river&mdash;and the
+lights of the fort glimmering in long lines across the water had
+vanished behind.  The prow of Radisson's boat was once more heading
+upstream for the Unknown.  Paddling with all swiftness through the
+dark, the three Frenchmen had come to the rushes of Lake St. Peter
+before daybreak.  No Indians could be found.  Men of softer mettle
+might have turned back.  Not so Radisson.  "We were well-armed and had
+a good boat," he relates, "so we resolved to paddle day and night to
+overtake the Indians."  At the west end of the lake they came up with
+the north-bound canoes.  For three days and nights they pushed on
+without rest.  Naturally, Radisson did not pause to report progress at
+Montreal.  Game was so plentiful in the surrounding forests that
+Iroquois hunters were always abroad in the regions of the St. Lawrence
+and Ottawa.[3]  Once they heard guns.  Turning a bend in the river,
+they discovered five Iroquois boats, just in time to avoid them.  That
+night the Frenchman, Larivi�re, dreamed that he had been captured by
+the Mohawks, and he shouted out in such terror that the alarmed Indians
+rushed to embark.  The next day they again came on the trail of
+Iroquois.  The frightened Indians from the Upper Country shouldered
+their canoes and dashed through the woods.  Larivi�re could not keep up
+and was afraid to go back from the river lest he should lose his
+bearings.  Fighting his way over windfall and rock, he sank exhausted
+and fell asleep.  Far ahead of the Iroquois boats the Upper Country
+Indians came together again.  The Frenchman was nowhere to be found.
+It was dark.  The Indians would not wait to search.  Radisson and
+Groseillers dared not turn back to face the irate governor.  Larivi�re
+was abandoned.  Two weeks afterwards some French hunters found him
+lying on the rocks almost dead from starvation.  He was sent back to
+Three Rivers, where D'Avaugour had him imprisoned.  This outrage the
+inhabitants of Three Rivers resented.  They forced the jail and rescued
+Larivi�re.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Three days after the loss of Larivi�re Radisson and Groseillers caught
+up with seven more canoes of Indians from the Upper Country.  The union
+of the two bands was just in time, for the next day they were set upon
+at a <I>portage</I> by the Iroquois.  Ordering the Indians to encase
+themselves in bucklers of matting and buffalo hide, Radisson led the
+assault on the Iroquois barricade.  Trees were cut down, and the Upper
+Indians rushed the rude fort with timbers extemporized into
+battering-rams.  In close range of the enemy, Radisson made a curious
+discovery.  Frenchmen were directing the Iroquois warriors.  Who had
+sent these French to intercept the explorers?  If Radisson suspected
+treachery on the part of jealous rivals from Quebec, it must have
+redoubled his fury; for the Indians from the Upper Country threw
+themselves in the breached barricade with such force that the Iroquois
+lost heart and tossed belts of wampum over the stockades to supplicate
+peace.  It was almost night.  Radisson's Indians drew off to consider
+the terms of peace.  When morning came, behold an empty fort!  The
+French renegades had fled with their Indian allies.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-108"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-108.jpg" ALT="Ch�teau St. Louis, Quebec, 1669, from one of the oldest prints in existence." BORDER="2" WIDTH="397" HEIGHT="268">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Ch�teau St. Louis, Quebec, 1669, from one of the oldest
+prints in existence.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Glad to be rid of the first hindrance, the explorers once more sped
+north.  In the afternoon, Radisson's scouts ran full tilt into a band
+of Iroquois laden with beaver pelts.  The Iroquois were smarting from
+their defeat of the previous night; and what was Radisson's amusement
+to see his own scouts and the Iroquois running from each other in equal
+fright, while the ground between lay strewn with booty!  Radisson
+rushed his Indians for the waterside to intercept the Iroquois' flight.
+The Iroquois left their boats and swam for the opposite shore, where
+they threw up the usual barricade and entrenched themselves to shoot on
+Radisson's passing canoes.  Using the captured beaver pelts as shields,
+the Upper Indians ran the gantlet of the Iroquois fire with the loss of
+only one man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The slightest defeat may turn well-ordered retreat into panic.  If the
+explorers went on, the Iroquois would hang to the rear of the
+travelling Indians and pick off warriors till the Upper Country people
+became so weakened they would fall an easy prey.  Not flight, but
+fight, was Radisson's motto.  He ordered his men ashore to break up the
+barricade.  Darkness fell over the forest.  The Iroquois could not see
+to fire.  "They spared not their powder," relates Radisson, "but they
+made more noise than hurt."  Attaching a fuse to a barrel of powder,
+Radisson threw this over into the Iroquois fort.  The crash of the
+explosion was followed by a blaze of the Iroquois musketry that killed
+three of Radisson's men.  Radisson then tore the bark off a birch tree,
+filled the bole with powder, and in the darkness crept close to the
+Iroquois barricade and set fire to the logs.  Red tongues of fire
+leaped up, there was a roar as of wind, and the Iroquois fort was on
+fire.  Radisson's men dashed through the fire, hatchet in hand.  The
+Iroquois answered with their death chant.  Friend and foe merged in the
+smoke and darkness.  "We could not know one another in that skirmish of
+blows," says Radisson.  "There was noise to terrify the stoutest man."
+In the midst of the m�l�e a frightful storm of thunder and sheeted rain
+rolled over the forest.  "To my mind," writes the disgusted Radisson,
+"that was something extraordinary.  I think the Devil himself sent that
+storm to let those wretches escape, so that they might destroy more
+innocents."  The rain put out the fire.  As soon as the storm had
+passed, Radisson kindled torches to search for the missing.  Three of
+his men were slain, seven wounded.  Of the enemy, eleven lay dead, five
+were prisoners.  The rest of the Iroquois had fled to the forest.  The
+Upper Indians burned their prisoners according to their custom, and the
+night was passed in mad orgies to celebrate the victory.  "The sleep we
+took did not make our heads giddy," writes Radisson.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The next day they encountered more Iroquois.  Both sides at once began
+building forts; but when he could, Radisson always avoided war.  Having
+gained victory enough to hold the Iroquois in check, he wanted no
+massacre.  That night he embarked his men noiselessly; and never once
+stopping to kindle camp-fire, they paddled from Friday night to Tuesday
+morning.  The <I>portages </I>over rocks in the dark cut the <I>voyageurs'</I>
+moccasins to shreds.  Every landing was marked with the blood of
+bruised feet.  Sometimes they avoided leaving any trace of themselves
+by walking in the stream, dragging their boats along the edge of the
+rapids.  By Tuesday the Indians were so fagged that they could go no
+farther without rest.  Canoes were moored in the hiding of the rushes
+till the <I>voyageurs</I> slept.  They had been twenty-two days going from
+Three Rivers to Lake Nipissing, and had not slept one hour on land.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was October when they came to Lake Superior.  The forests were
+painted in all the glory of autumn, and game abounded.  White fish
+appeared under the clear, still waters of the lake like shoals of
+floating metal; bears were seen hulking away from the watering places
+of sandy shores; and wild geese whistled overhead.  After the terrible
+dangers of the voyage, with scant sleep and scanter fare, the country
+seemed, as Radisson says, a terrestrial paradise.  The Indians gave
+solemn thanks to their gods of earth and forest, "and we," writes
+Radisson, "to the God of gods."  Indian summer lay on the land.
+November found the explorers coasting the south shore of Lake Superior.
+They passed the Island of Michilimackinac with its stone arches.
+Radisson heard from the Indians of the copper mines.  He saw the
+pictured rocks that were to become famous for beauty.  "I gave it the
+name of St. Peter because that was my name and I was the first
+Christian to see it," he writes of the stone arch.  "There were in
+these places very deep caves, caused by the violence of the waves."
+Jesuits had been on the part of Lake Superior near the Sault, and poor
+M�nard perished in the forests of Lake Michigan; but Radisson and
+Groseillers were the first white men to cruise from south to west and
+west to north, where a chain of lakes and waterways leads from the
+Minnesota lake country to the prairies now known as Manitoba.  Before
+the end of November the explorers rounded the western end of Lake
+Superior and proceeded northwest.  Radisson records that they came to
+great winter encampments of the Crees; and the Crees did not venture
+east for fear of Sautaux and Iroquois.  He mentions a river of
+Sturgeons, where was a great store of fish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Crees wished to conduct the two white men to the wooded lake
+region, northwest towards the land of the Assiniboines, where Indian
+families took refuge on islands from those tigers of the plains&mdash;the
+Sioux&mdash;who were invincible on horseback but less skilful in canoes.
+The rivers were beginning to freeze.  Boats were abandoned; but there
+was no snow for snow-shoe travelling, and the explorers were unable to
+transport the goods brought for trade.  Bidding the Crees go to their
+families and bring back slaves to carry the baggage, Radisson and
+Groseillers built themselves the first fort and the first fur post
+between the Missouri and the North Pole.  It was evidently somewhere
+west of Duluth in either what is now Minnesota or northwestern Ontario.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+This fur post was the first habitation of civilization in all the Great
+Northwest.  Not the railway, not the cattle trail, not the path of
+forward-marching empire purposely hewing a way through the wilderness,
+opened the West.  It was the fur trade that found the West.  It was the
+fur trade that explored the West.  It was the fur trade that wrested
+the West from savagery.  The beginning was in the little fort built by
+Radisson and Groseillers.  No great factor in human progress ever had a
+more insignificant beginning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fort was rushed up by two men almost starving for food.  It was on
+the side of a river, built in the shape of a triangle, with the base at
+the water side.  The walls were of unbarked logs, the roof of thatched
+branches interlaced, with the door at the river side.  In the middle of
+the earth floor, so that the smoke would curl up where the branches
+formed a funnel or chimney, was the fire.  On the right of the fire,
+two hewn logs overlaid with pine boughs made a bed.  On the left,
+another hewn log acted as a table.  Jumbled everywhere, hanging from
+branches and knobs of branches, were the firearms, clothing, and
+merchandise of the two fur traders.  Naturally, a fort two thousand
+miles from help needed sentries.  Radisson had not forgotten his
+boyhood days of Onondaga.  He strung carefully concealed cords through
+the grass and branches around the fort.  To these bells were fastened,
+and the bells were the sentries.  The two white men could now sleep
+soundly without fear of approach.  This fort, from which sprang the
+buoyant, aggressive, prosperous, free life of the Great Northwest, was
+founded and built and completed in two days.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The West had begun.[4]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a beginning which every Western pioneer was to repeat for the
+next two hundred years: first, the log cabins; then, the fight with the
+wilderness for food.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson, being the younger, went into the woods to hunt, while
+Groseillers kept house.  Wild geese and ducks were whistling south, but
+"the whistling that I made," writes Radisson, "was another music than
+theirs; for I killed three and scared the rest."  Strange Indians came
+through the forest, but were not admitted to the tiny fort, lest
+knowledge of the traders' weakness should tempt theft.  Many a night
+the explorers were roused by a sudden ringing of the bells or crashing
+through the underbrush, to find that wild animals had been attracted by
+the smell of meat, and wolverine or wildcat was attempting to tear
+through the matted branches of the thatched roof.  The desire for
+firearms has tempted Indians to murder many a trader; so Radisson and
+Groseillers <I>cached</I> all the supplies that they did not need in a hole
+across the river.  News of the two white men alone in the northern
+forest spread like wild-fire to the different Sautaux and Ojibway
+encampments; and Radisson invented another protection in addition to
+the bells.  He rolled gunpowder in twisted tubes of birch bark, and ran
+a circle of this round the fort.  Putting a torch to the birch, he
+surprised the Indians by displaying to them a circle of fire running
+along the ground in a series of jumps.  To the Indians it was magic.
+The two white men were engirt with a mystery that defended them from
+all harm.  Thus white men passed their first winter in the Great
+Northwest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Toward winter four hundred Crees came to escort the explorers to the
+wooded lake region yet farther west towards the land of the
+Assiniboines, the modern Manitoba.  "We were Caesars," writes Radisson.
+"There was no one to contradict us.  We went away free from any burden,
+while those poor miserables thought themselves happy to carry our
+equipage in the hope of getting a brass ring, or an awl, or a
+needle.&#8230;  They admired our actions more than the fools of Paris
+their king.&#8230;[5]  They made a great noise, calling us gods and
+devils.  We marched four days through the woods.  The country was
+beautiful with clear parks.  At last we came within a league of the
+Cree cabins, where we spent the night that we might enter the
+encampment with pomp the next day.  The swiftest Indians ran ahead to
+warn the people of our coming."  Embarking in boats, where the water
+was open, the two explorers came to the Cree lodges.  They were
+welcomed with shouts.  Messengers marched in front, scattering presents
+from the white men,&mdash;kettles to call all to a feast of friendship;
+knives to encourage the warriors to be brave; swords to signify that
+the white men would fight all enemies of the Cree; and abundance of
+trinkets&mdash;needles and awls and combs and tin mirrors&mdash;for the women.
+The Indians prostrated themselves as slaves; and the explorers were
+conducted to a grand council of welcome.  A feast was held, followed by
+a symbolic dance in celebration of the white men's presence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Their entry to the Great Northwest had been a triumph: but they could
+not escape the privations of the explorer's life.  Winter set in with a
+severity to make up for the long, late autumn.  Snow fell continuously
+till day and night were as one, the sombre forests muffled to silence
+with the wild creatures driven for shelter to secret haunts.  Four
+hundred men had brought the explorers north.  Allowing an average of
+four to each family, there must have been sixteen hundred people in the
+encampment of Crees.  To prevent famine, the Crees scattered to the
+winter hunting-grounds, arranging to come together again in two months
+at a northern rendezvous.  When Radisson and Groseillers came to the
+rendezvous, they learned that the gathering hunters had had poor luck.
+Food was short.  To make matters worse, heavy rains were followed by
+sharp frost.  The snow became iced over, destroying rabbit and grouse,
+which feed the large game.  Radisson noticed that the Indians often
+snatched food from the hands of hungry children.  More starving Crees
+continued to come into camp.  Soon the husbands were taking the wives'
+share of food, and the women were subsisting on dried pelts.  The Crees
+became too weak to carry their snow-shoes, or to gather wood for fire.
+The cries of the dying broke the deathly stillness of the winter
+forest; and the strong began to dog the footsteps of the weak.  "Good
+God, have mercy on these innocent people," writes Radisson; "have mercy
+on us who acknowledge Thee!"  Digging through the snow with their
+rackets, some of the Crees got roots to eat.  Others tore the bark from
+trees and made a kind of soup that kept them alive.  Two weeks after
+the famine set in, the Indians were boiling the pulverized bones of the
+waste heap.  After that the only food was the buckskin that had been
+tanned for clothing.  "We ate it so eagerly," writes Radisson, "that
+our gums did bleed.&#8230;  We became the image of death."  Before the
+spring five hundred Crees had died of famine.  Radisson and Groseillers
+scarcely had strength to drag the dead from the tepees.  The Indians
+thought that Groseillers had been fed by some fiend, for his heavy,
+black beard covered his thin face.  Radisson they loved, because his
+beardless face looked as gaunt as theirs.[6]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Relief came with the breaking of the weather.  The rain washed the iced
+snows away; deer began to roam; and with the opening of the rivers came
+two messengers from the Sioux to invite Radisson and Groseillers to
+visit their nation.  The two Sioux had a dog, which they refused to
+sell for all Radisson's gifts.  The Crees dared not offend the Sioux
+ambassadors by stealing the worthless cur on which such hungry eyes
+were cast, but at night Radisson slipped up to the Sioux tepee.  The
+dog came prowling out.  Radisson stabbed it so suddenly that it dropped
+without a sound.  Hurrying back, he boiled and fed the meat to the
+famishing Crees.  When the Sioux returned to their own country, they
+sent a score of slaves with food for the starving encampment.  No doubt
+Radisson had plied the first messengers with gifts; for the slaves
+brought word that thirty picked runners from the Sioux were coming to
+escort the white men to the prairie.  To receive their benefactors, and
+also, perhaps, to show that they were not defenceless, the Crees at
+once constructed a fort; for Cree and Sioux had been enemies from time
+immemorial.  In two days came the runners, clad only in short garments,
+and carrying bow and quiver.  The Crees led the young braves to the
+fort.  Kettles were set out.  Fagged from the long run, the Sioux ate
+without a word.  At the end of the meal one rose.  Shooting an arrow
+into the air as a sign that he called Deity to witness the truth of his
+words, he proclaimed in a loud voice that the elders of the Sioux
+nation would arrive next day at the fort to make a treaty with the
+French.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The news was no proof of generosity.  The Sioux were the great warriors
+of the West.  They knew very well that whoever formed an alliance with
+the French would obtain firearms; and firearms meant victory against
+all other tribes.  The news set the Crees by the ears.  Warriors
+hastened from the forests to defend the fort.  The next day came the
+elders of the Sioux in pomp.  They were preceded by the young braves
+bearing bows and arrows and buffalo-skin shields on which were drawn
+figures portraying victories.  Their hair was turned up in a stiff
+crest surmounted by eagle feathers, and their bodies were painted
+bright vermilion.  Behind came the elders, with medicine-bags of
+rattlesnake skin streaming from their shoulders and long strings of
+bears' claws hanging from neck and wrist.  They were dressed in
+buckskin, garnished with porcupine quills, and wore moccasins of
+buffalo hide, with the hair dangling from the heel.  In the belt of
+each was a skull-cracker&mdash;a sort of sling stone with a long handle&mdash;and
+a war-hatchet.  Each elder carried a peace pipe set with precious
+stones, and stuck in the stem were the quills of the war eagle to
+represent enemies slain.  Women slaves followed, loaded with skins for
+the elders' tents.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-120"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-120.jpg" ALT="A parley on the Plains." BORDER="2" WIDTH="629" HEIGHT="414">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: A parley on the Plains.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+A great fire had been kindled inside the court of the Cree stockades.
+Round the pavilion the Sioux elders seated themselves.  First, they
+solemnly smoked the calumet of peace.  Then the chief of the Sioux rose
+and chanted a song, giving thanks for their safe journey.  Setting
+aside gifts of rare beaver pelts, he declared that the Sioux had come
+to make friends with the French, who were masters of peace and war;
+that the elders would conduct the white men back to the Sioux country;
+that the mountains were levelled and the valleys cast up, and the way
+made smooth, and branches strewn on the ground for the white men's
+feet, and streams bridged, and the doors of the tepees open.  Let the
+French come to the Sioux!  The Indians would die for the French.  A
+gift was presented to invoke the friendship of the Crees.  Another rich
+gift of furs let out the secret of the Sioux' anxiety: it was that the
+French might give the Sioux "thunder weapons," meaning guns.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The speech being finished, the Crees set a feast before their guests.
+To this feast Radisson and Groseillers came in a style that eclipsed
+the Sioux.  Cree warriors marched in front, carrying guns.  Radisson
+and Groseillers were dressed in armor.[7]  At their belts they wore
+pistol, sword, and dagger.  On their heads were crowns of colored
+porcupine quills.  Two pages carried the dishes and spoons to be used
+at the feast; and four Cree magicians followed with smoking calumets in
+their hands.  Four Indian maids carried bearskins to place on the
+ground when the two explorers deigned to sit down.  Inside the fort
+more than six hundred councillors had assembled.  Outside were gathered
+a thousand spectators.  As Radisson and Groseillers entered, an old
+Cree flung a peace pipe at the explorers' feet and sang a song of
+thanksgiving to the sun that he had lived to see "those terrible men
+whose words (guns) made the earth quake."  Stripping himself of his
+costly furs, he placed them on the white men's shoulders, shouting: "Ye
+are masters over us; dead or alive, dispose of us as you will."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Radisson rose and chanted a song, in which he declared that the
+French took the Crees for brethren and would defend them.  To prove his
+words, he threw powder in the fire and had twelve guns shot off, which
+frightened the Sioux almost out of their senses.  A slave girl placed a
+coal in the calumet.  Radisson then presented gifts; the first to
+testify that the French adopted the Sioux for friends; the second as a
+token that the French also took the Crees for friends; the third as a
+sign that the French "would reduce to powder with heavenly fire" any
+one who disturbed the peace between these tribes.  The fourth gift was
+in grateful recognition of the Sioux' courtesy in granting free passage
+through their country.  The gifts consisted of kettles and hatchets and
+awls and needles and looking-glasses and bells and combs and paint, but
+<I>not</I> guns.  Radisson's speech was received with "Ho, ho's" of
+applause.  Sports began.  Radisson offered prizes for racing, jumping,
+shooting with the bow, and climbing a greased post.  All the while,
+musicians were singing and beating the tom-tom, a drum made of buffalo
+hide stretched on hoops and filled with water.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fourteen days later Radisson and Groseillers set out for the Sioux
+country, or what are now known as the Northwestern states.[8]  On the
+third voyage Radisson came to the Sioux from the south.  On this
+voyage, he came to them from the northeast.  He found that the tribe
+numbered seven thousand men of fighting age.  He remarked that the
+Sioux used a kind of coke or peat for fire instead of wood.  While he
+heard of the tribes that used coal for fire, he does not relate that he
+went to them on this trip.  Again he heard of the mountains far inland,
+where the Indians found copper and lead and a kind of stone that was
+transparent.[9]  He remained six weeks with the Sioux, hunting buffalo
+and deer.  Between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan ran a well-beaten
+trail northeastward, which was used by the Crees and the Sioux in their
+wars.  It is probable that the Sioux escorted Radisson back to the
+Crees by this trail, till he was across what is now the boundary
+between Minnesota and Canada, and could strike directly eastward for
+the Lake of the Woods region, or the hinterland between James Bay and
+Lake Superior.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In spring the Crees went to the Bay of the North, which Radisson was
+seeking; and after leaving the Sioux, the two explorers struck for the
+little fort north of Lake Superior, where they had <I>cached</I> their
+goods.  Spring in the North was later than spring in the South; but the
+shore ice of the Northern lakes had already become soft.  To save time
+they cut across the lakes of Minnesota, dragging their sleighs on the
+ice.  Groseillers' sleigh was loaded with pelts obtained from the
+Sioux, and the elder man began to fag.  Radisson took the heavy sleigh,
+giving Groseillers the lighter one.  About twelve miles out from the
+shore, on one of these lakes, the ice suddenly gave, and Radisson
+plunged through to his waist.  It was as dangerous to turn back as to
+go on.  If they deserted their merchandise, they would have nothing to
+trade with the Indians; but when Radisson succeeded in extricating
+himself, he was so badly strained that he could not go forward another
+step.  There was no sense in risking both their lives on the rotten
+ice.  He urged Groseillers to go on.  Groseillers dared not hesitate.
+Laying two sleds as a wind-break on each side of Radisson, he covered
+the injured man with robes, consigned him to the keeping of God, and
+hurried over the ice to obtain help from the Crees.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Crees got Radisson ashore, and there he lay in agony for eight
+days.  The Indians were preparing to set out for the North.  They
+invited Radisson to go with them.  His sprain had not healed; but he
+could not miss the opportunity of approaching the Bay of the North.
+For two days he marched with the hunters, enduring torture at every
+step.  The third day he could go no farther and they deserted him.
+Groseillers had gone hunting with another band of Crees.  Radisson had
+neither gun nor hatchet, and the Indians left him only ten pounds of
+pemmican.  After a short rest he journeyed painfully on, following the
+trail of the marching Crees.  On the fifth day he found the frame of a
+deserted wigwam.  Covering it with branches of trees and kindling a
+fire to drive off beasts of prey, he crept in and lay down to sleep.
+He was awakened by a crackling of flame.  The fire had caught the pine
+boughs and the tepee was in a blaze.  Radisson flung his snow-shoes and
+clothing as far as he could, and broke from the fire-trap.
+Half-dressed and lame, shuddering with cold and hunger, he felt through
+the dark over the snow for his clothing.  A far cry rang through the
+forest like the bay of the wolf pack.  Radisson kept solitary watch
+till morning, when he found that the cry came from Indians sent out to
+find him by Groseillers.  He was taken to an encampment, where the
+Crees were building canoes to go to the Bay of the North.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The entire band, with the two explorers, then launched on the rivers
+flowing north.  "We were in danger to perish a thousand times from the
+ice jam," writes Radisson.  ". . .  At last we came full sail from a
+deep bay&nbsp;&#8230; we came to the seaside, where we found an old house all
+demolished and battered with bullets.&#8230;  They (the Crees) told us
+about Europeans.&#8230;  We went from isle to isle all that
+summer.&#8230;  This region had a great store of cows (caribou).&#8230;
+We went farther to see the place that the Indians were to pass the
+summer.&#8230;  The river (where they went) came from the lake that
+empties itself in&nbsp;&#8230; the Saguenay&nbsp;&#8230; a hundred leagues from the
+great river of Canada (the St. Lawrence)&nbsp;&#8230; to where we were in the
+Bay of the North.&#8230;  We passed the summer quietly coasting the
+seaside.&#8230;  The people here burn not their prisoners, but knock
+them on the head.&#8230;  They have a store of turquoise.&#8230;  They
+find green stones, very fine, at the same Bay of the Sea
+(labradorite).&#8230;  We went up another river to the Upper Lake
+(Winnipeg)." [10]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For years the dispute has been waged with zeal worthy of a better cause
+whether Radisson referred to Hudson Bay in this passage.  The French
+claim that he did; the English that he did not.  "The house demolished
+with bullets" was probably an old trading post, contend the English;
+but there was no trading post except Radisson's west of Lake Superior
+at that time, retort the French.  By "cows" Radisson meant buffalo, and
+no buffalo were found as far east as Hudson Bay, say the English; by
+"cows" Radisson meant caribou and deer, and herds of these frequented
+the shores of Hudson Bay, answer the French.  No river comes from the
+Saguenay to Hudson Bay, declare the English; yes, but a river comes
+from the direction of the Saguenay, and was followed by subsequent
+explorers, assert the French.[11]  The stones of turquoise and green
+were agates from Lake Superior, explain the English; the stones were
+labradorites from the east coast of the Bay, maintain the French.  So
+the childish quarrel has gone on for two centuries.  England and France
+alike conspired to crush the man while he lived; and when he died they
+quarrelled over the glory of his discoveries.  The point is not whether
+Radisson actually wet his oars in the different indentations of Hudson
+and James bays.  The point is that he found where it lay from the Great
+Lakes, and discovered the watershed sloping north from the Great Lakes
+to Hudson Bay.  This was new ground, and entitled Radisson to the fame
+of a discoverer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the Indians of the bay, Radisson heard of another lake leagues to
+the north, whose upper end was always frozen.  This was probably some
+vague story of the lakes in the region that was to become known two
+centuries later as Mackenzie River.  The spring of 1663 found the
+explorers back in the Lake of the Woods region accompanied by seven
+hundred Indians of the Upper Country.  The company filled three hundred
+and sixty canoes.  Indian girls dived into the lake to push the canoes
+off, and stood chanting a song of good-speed till the boats had glided
+out of sight through the long, narrow, rocky gaps of the Lake of the
+Woods.  At Lake Superior the company paused to lay up a supply of
+smoked sturgeon.  At the Sault four hundred Crees turned back.  The
+rest of the Indians hoisted blankets on fishing-poles, and, with a west
+wind, scudded across Lake Huron to Lake Nipissing.  From Lake Nipissing
+they rode safely down the Ottawa to Montreal.  Cannon were fired to
+welcome the discoverers, for New France was again on the verge of
+bankruptcy from a beaver famine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A different welcome awaited them at Quebec.  D'Argenson, the governor,
+was about to leave for France, and nothing had come of the Jesuit
+expedition up the Saguenay.  He had already sent Couture, for a second
+time, overland to find a way to Hudson Bay; but no word had come from
+Couture, and the governor's time was up.  The explorers had disobeyed
+him in leaving without his permission.  Their return with a fortune of
+pelts was the salvation of the impecunious governor.  From 1627 to 1663
+five distinct fur companies, organized under the patronage of royalty,
+had gone bankrupt in New France.[12]  Therefore, it became a loyal
+governor to protect his Majesty's interests.  Besides, the revenue
+collectors could claim one-fourth of all returns in beaver except from
+posts farmed expressly for the king.  No sooner had Radisson and
+Groseillers come home than D'Argenson ordered Groseillers imprisoned.
+He then fined the explorers $20,000, to build a fort at Three Rivers,
+giving them leave to put their coats-of-arms on the gate; a $30,000
+fine was to go to the public treasury of New France; $70,000 worth of
+beaver was seized as the tax due the revenue.  Of a cargo worth
+$300,000 in modern money, Radisson and Groseillers had less than
+$20,000 left.[13]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Had D'Argenson and his successors encouraged instead of persecuted the
+discoverers, France could have claimed all North America but the narrow
+strip of New England on the east and the Spanish settlements on the
+south.  Having repudiated Radisson and Groseillers, France could not
+claim the fruits of deeds which she punished.[14]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] The childish dispute whether Bourdon sailed into the bay and up to
+its head, or only to 50 degrees N. latitude, does not concern
+Radisson's life, and, therefore, is ignored.  One thing I can state
+with absolute certainty from having been up the coast of Labrador in a
+most inclement season, that Bourdon could not possibly have gone to and
+back from the inner waters of Hudson Bay between May 2 and August 11.
+J. Edmond Roy and Mr. Sulte both pronounce Bourdon a myth, and his trip
+a fabrication.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] "Shame put upon them," says Radisson.  M�nard did <I>not</I> go out with
+Radisson and Groseillers, as is erroneously recorded.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] I have purposely avoided stating whether Radisson went by way of
+Lake Ontario or the Ottawa.  Dr. Dionne thinks that he went by Ontario
+and Niagara because Radisson refers to vast waterfalls under which a
+man could walk.  Radisson gives the height of these falls as forty
+feet.  Niagara are nearer three hundred; and the Chaudi�re of the
+Ottawa would answer Radisson's description better, were it not that he
+says a man could go under the falls for a quarter of a mile.  "The Lake
+of the Castors" plainly points to Lake Nipissing.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[4] The two main reasons why I think that Radisson and Groseillers were
+now moving up that chain of lakes and rivers between Minnesota and
+Canada, connecting Lake of the Woods with Lake Winnipeg, are: (1)
+Oldmixon says it was the report of the Assiniboine Indians from Lake
+Assiniboine (Lake Winnipeg) that led Radisson to seek for the Bay of
+the North overland.  These Assiniboines did not go to the bay by way of
+Lake Superior, but by way of Lake Winnipeg.  (2) A m�moire written by
+De la Chesnaye in 1696&mdash;see <I>Documents Nouvelle France</I>,
+1492-1712&mdash;distinctly refers to a <I>coureur's</I> trail from Lake Superior
+to Lake Assiniboine or Lake Winnipeg.  There is no record of any
+Frenchmen but Radisson and Groseillers having followed such a trail to
+the land of the Assiniboines&mdash;the Manitoba of to-day&mdash;before 1676.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[5] One can guess that a man who wrote in that spirit two centuries
+before the French Revolution would not be a sycophant in
+courts,&mdash;which, perhaps, helps to explain the conspiracy of silence
+that obscured Radisson's fame.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[6] My reason for thinking that this region was farther north than
+Minnesota is the size of the Cree winter camp; but I have refrained
+from trying to localize this part of the trip, except to say it was
+west and north of Duluth.  Some writers recognize in the description
+parts of Minnesota, others the hinterland between Lake Superior and
+James Bay.  In the light of the <I>m�moire</I> of 1696 sent to the French
+government, I am unable to regard this itinerary as any other than the
+famous fur traders' trail between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg by
+way of Sturgeon River and the Lake of the Woods.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[7] <I>Radisson Relations</I>, p. 207.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[8] We are now on safe ground.  There was a well-known trail from what
+is now known as the Rat Portage region to the great Sioux camps west of
+the Mississippi and Red River valleys.  But again I refuse to lay
+myself open to controversy by trying definitely to give either the
+dates or exact places of this trip.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[9] If any proof is wanted that Radisson's journeyings took him far
+west of the Mississippi, these details afford it.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[10] <I>Radisson's Journal</I>, pp. 224, 225, 226.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[11] Mr. A. P. Low, who has made the most thorough exploration of
+Labrador and Hudson Bay of any man living, says, "Rupert River forms
+the discharge of the Mistassini lakes&nbsp;&#8230; and empties into Rupert Bay
+close to the mouth of the Nottoway River, and rises in a number of
+lakes close to the height of land dividing it from the St. Maurice
+River, which joins the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[12] <I>Les Compagnies de Colonisation sous l'ancien r�gime</I>, by
+Chailly-Bert.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[13] Oldmixon says: "Radisson and Groseillers met with some savages on
+the Lake of Assiniboin, and from them they learned that they might go
+by land to the bottom of Hudson's Bay, where the English had not been
+yet, at James Bay; upon which they desired them to conduct them
+thither, and the savages accordingly did it.  They returned to the
+Upper Lake the same way they came, and thence to Quebec, where they
+offered the principal merchants to carry ships to Hudson's Bay; but
+their project was rejected."  Vol. I, p. 548.  Radisson's figures are
+given as "pounds "; but by "<I>L</I>" did he mean English "pound" or French
+livre, that is 17 cents?  A franc in 1660 equalled the modern dollar.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[14] The exact tribes mentioned in the <I>M�moire of 1696</I>, with whom the
+French were in trade in the West are: On the "Missoury" and south of
+it, the Mascoutins and Sioux; two hundred miles beyond the "Missisipy"
+the Issaguy, the Octbatons, the Omtous, of whom were Sioux capable of
+mustering four thousand warriors, south of Lake Superior, the Sauteurs,
+on "Sipisagny, the river which is the discharge of Lake Asemipigon"
+(Winnipeg), the "Nation of the Grand Rat," Algonquins numbering two
+thousand, who traded with the English of Hudson Bay, De la Chesnaye
+adds in his m�moire details of the trip from Lake Superior to the lake
+of the Assiniboines.  Knowing what close co-workers he and Radisson
+were, we can guess where he got his information.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER V
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1664-1676
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RADISSON RENOUNCES ALLEGIANCE TO TWO CROWNS
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Rival Traders thwart the Plans of the Discoverers&mdash;Entangled in
+Lawsuits, the two French Explorers go to England&mdash;The Organization of
+the Hudson's Bay Fur Company&mdash;Radisson the Storm-centre of
+International Intrigue&mdash;Boston Merchants in the Struggle to capture the
+Fur Trade
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Henceforth Radisson and Groseillers were men without a country.  Twice
+their return from the North with cargoes of beaver had saved New France
+from ruin.  They had discovered more of America than all the other
+explorers combined.  Their reward was jealous rivalry that reduced them
+to beggary; injustice that compelled them to renounce allegiance to two
+crowns; obloquy during a lifetime; and oblivion for two centuries after
+their death.  The very force of unchecked impulse that carries the hero
+over all obstacles may also carry him over the bounds of caution and
+compromise that regulate the conduct of other men.  This was the case
+with Radisson and Groseillers.  They were powerless to resist the
+extortion of the French governor.  The Company of One Hundred
+Associates had given place to the Company of the West Indies.  This
+trading venture had been organized under the direct patronage of the
+king.[1]  It had been proclaimed from the pulpits of France.
+Privileges were promised to all who subscribed for the stock.  The
+Company was granted a blank list of titles to bestow on its patrons and
+servants.  No one else in New France might engage in the beaver trade;
+no one else might buy skins from the Indians and sell the pelts in
+Europe; and one-fourth of the trade went for public revenue.  In spite
+of all the privileges, fur company after fur company failed in New
+France; but to them Radisson had to sell his furs, and when the revenue
+officers went over the cargo, the minions of the governor also seized a
+share under pretence of a fine for trading without a license.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Groseillers was furious, and sailed for France to demand restitution;
+but the intriguing courtiers proved too strong for him.  Though he
+spent 10,000 pounds, nothing was done.  D'Avaugour had come back to
+France, and stockholders of the jealous fur company were all-powerful
+at court.  Groseillers then relinquished all idea of restitution, and
+tried to interest merchants in another expedition to Hudson Bay by way
+of the sea.[2]  He might have spared himself the trouble.  His
+enthusiasm only aroused the quiet smile of supercilious indifference.
+His plans were regarded as chimerical.  Finally a merchant of Rochelle
+half promised to send a boat to Isle Perc�e at the mouth of the St.
+Lawrence in 1664.  Groseillers had already wasted six months.  Eager
+for action, he hurried back to Three Rivers, where Radisson awaited
+him.  The two secretly took passage in a fishing schooner to Anticosti,
+and from Anticosti went south to Isle Perc�e.  Here a Jesuit just out
+from France bore the message to them that no ship would come.  The
+promise had been a put-off to rid France of the enthusiast.  New France
+had treated them with injustice.  Old France with mockery.  Which way
+should they turn?  They could not go back to Three Rivers.  This
+attempt to go to Hudson Bay without a license laid them open to a
+second fine.  Baffled, but not beaten, the explorers did what
+ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done in similar
+circumstances&mdash;they left the country.  Some rumor of their intention to
+abandon New France must have gone abroad; for when they reached Cape
+Breton, their servants grumbled so loudly that a mob of Frenchmen
+threatened to burn the explorers.  Dismissing their servants, Radisson
+and Groseillers escaped to Port Royal, Nova Scotia.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-134"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-134.jpg" ALT="Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three Rivers." BORDER="2" WIDTH="394" HEIGHT="264">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three
+Rivers.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+In Port Royal they met a sea-captain from Boston, Zechariah Gillam, who
+offered his ship for a voyage to Hudson Bay, but the season was far
+spent when they set out.  Captain Gillam was afraid to enter the
+ice-locked bay so late in summer.  The boat turned back, and the trip
+was a loss.  This run of ill-luck had now lasted for a year.  They
+still had some money from the Northern trips, and they signed a
+contract with ship-owners of Boston to take two vessels to Hudson Bay
+the following spring.  Provisions must be laid up for the long voyage.
+One of the ships was sent to the Grand Banks for fish.  Rounding
+eastward past the crescent reefs of Sable Island, the ship was caught
+by the beach-combers and totally wrecked on the drifts of sand.
+Instead of sailing for Hudson Bay in the spring of 1665, Radisson and
+Groseillers were summoned to Boston to defend themselves in a lawsuit
+for the value of the lost vessel.  They were acquitted; but lawsuits on
+the heels of misfortune exhausted the resources of the adventurers.
+The exploits of the two Frenchmen had become the sensation of Boston.
+Sir Robert Carr, one of the British commissioners then in the New
+England colonies, urged Radisson and Groseillers to renounce allegiance
+to a country that had shown only ingratitude, and to come to
+England.[3]  When Sir George Cartwright sailed from Nantucket on August
+1, 1665, he was accompanied by Radisson and Groseillers.[4]  Misfortune
+continued to dog them.  Within a few days' sail of England, their ship
+encountered the Dutch cruiser <I>Caper</I>.  For two hours the ships poured
+broadsides of shot into each other's hulls.  The masts were torn from
+the English vessel.  She was boarded and stripped, and the Frenchmen
+were thoroughly questioned.  Then the captives were all landed in
+Spain.  Accompanied by the two Frenchmen, Sir George Cartwright
+hastened to England early in 1666.  The plague had driven the court
+from London to Oxford.  Cartwright laid the plans of the explorers
+before Charles II.  The king ordered 40s. a week paid to Radisson and
+Groseillers for the winter.  They took chambers in London.  Later they
+followed the court to Windsor, where they were received by King Charles.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The English court favored the project of trade in Hudson Bay, but
+during the Dutch war nothing could be done.  The captain of the Dutch
+ship <I>Caper</I> had sent word of the French explorers to De Witt, the
+great statesman.  De Witt despatched a spy from Picardy, France, one
+Eli Godefroy Touret, who chanced to know Groseillers, to meet the
+explorers in London.  Masking as Groseillers' nephew, Touret tried to
+bribe both men to join the Dutch.  Failing this, he attempted to
+undermine their credit with the English by accusing Radisson and
+Groseillers of counterfeiting money; but the English court refused to
+be deceived, and Touret was imprisoned.  Owing to the plague and the
+war, two years passed without the vague promises of the English court
+taking shape.  Montague, the English ambassador to France, heard of the
+explorers' feats, and wrote to Prince Rupert.  Prince Rupert was a
+soldier of fortune, who could enter into the spirit of the explorers.
+He had fought on the losing side against Cromwell, and then taken to
+the high seas to replenish broken fortunes by piracy.  The wealth of
+the beaver trade appealed to him.  He gave all the influence of his
+<I>prestige</I> to the explorers' plans.  By the spring of 1668 money enough
+had been advanced to fit out two boats for Hudson Bay.  In the <I>Eagle</I>,
+with Captain Stannard, went Radisson; in the <I>Nonsuch</I>, with Captain
+Zechariah Gillam of Boston, went Groseillers.  North of Ireland furious
+gales drove the ships apart.  Radisson's vessel was damaged and driven
+back to London; but his year was not wasted.  It is likely that the
+account of his first voyages was written while Groseillers was away.[5]
+Sometime during his stay in London he married Mary Kirke, a daughter of
+the Huguenot John Kirke, whose family had long ago gone from Boston and
+captured Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gillam's journal records that the <I>Nonsuch</I> left Gravesend the 3d of
+June, 1668, reached Resolution Island on August 4, and came to anchor
+at the south of James Bay on September 29.[6]  It was here that
+Radisson had come overland five years before, when he thought that he
+discovered a river flowing from the direction of the St. Lawrence.  The
+river was Nemisco.  Groseillers called it Rupert in honor of his
+patron.  A palisaded fort was at once built, and named King Charles
+after the English monarch.  By December, the bay was locked in the
+deathly silence of northern frost.  Snow fell till the air became
+darkened day after day, a ceaseless fall of muffling snow; the
+earth&mdash;as Gillam's journal says&mdash;"seemed frozen to death."  Gillam
+attended to the fort, Groseillers to the trade.  Dual command was bound
+to cause a clash.  By April, 1669, the terrible cold had relaxed.  The
+ice swept out of the river with a roar.  Wild fowl came winging north
+in myriad flocks.  By June the fort was sweltering in almost tropical
+heat.  The <I>Nonsuch</I> hoisted anchor and sailed for England, loaded to
+the water-line with a cargo of furs.  Honors awaited Groseillers in
+London.  King Charles created him a <I>Knight de la Jarreti�re</I>, an order
+for princes of the royal blood.[7]  In addition, he was granted a sum
+of money.  Prince Rupert and Radisson had, meanwhile, been busy
+organizing a fur company.  The success of Groseillers' voyage now
+assured this company a royal charter, which was granted in May, 1670.
+Such was the origin of the Hudson's Bay Company.  Prince Rupert was its
+first governor; Charles Bayly was appointed resident governor on the
+bay.  Among the first shareholders were Prince Rupert, the Duke of
+York, Sir George Cartwright, the Duke of Albermarle, Shaftesbury, Sir
+Peter Colleton, who had advanced Radisson a loan during the long period
+of waiting, and Sir John Kirke, whose daughter had married Radisson.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That spring, Radisson and Groseillers again sailed for the bay.  In
+1671, three ships were sent out from England, and Radisson established
+a second post westward at Moose.  With Governor Bayly, he sailed up and
+met the Indians at what was to become the great fur capital of the
+north, Port Nelson, or York.  The third year of the company's
+existence, Radisson and Groseillers perceived a change.  Not so many
+Indians came down to the English forts to trade.  Those who came brought
+fewer pelts and demanded higher prices.  Rivals had been at work.  The
+English learned that the French had come overland and were paying high
+prices to draw the Indians from the bay.  In the spring a council was
+held.[8]  Should they continue on the east side of the bay, or move
+west, where there would be no rivalry?  Groseillers boldly counselled
+moving inland and driving off French competition.  Bayly was for moving
+west.  He even hinted that Groseillers' advice sprang from disloyalty
+to the English.  The clash that was inevitable from divided command was
+this time avoided by compromise.  They would all sail west, and all
+come back to Rupert's River.  When they returned, they found that the
+English ensign had been torn down and the French flag raised.[9]  A
+veteran Jesuit missionary of the Saguenay, Charles Albanel, two French
+companions, and some Indian guides had ensconced themselves in the
+empty houses.[10]  The priest now presented Governor Bayly with letters
+from Count Frontenac commending the French to the good offices of
+Governor Bayly.[11]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+France had not been idle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When it was too late, the country awakened to the injustice done
+Radisson and Groseillers.  While Radisson was still in Boston, all
+restrictions were taken from the beaver trade, except the tax of
+one-fourth to the revenue.  The Jesuit Dablon, who was near the western
+end of Lake Superior, gathered all the information he could from the
+Indians of the way to the Sea of the North.  Father Marquette learned
+of the Mississippi from the Indians.  The Western tribes had been
+summoned to the Sault, where Sieur de Saint-Lusson met them in treaty
+for the French; and the French flag was raised in the presence of P�re
+Claude Allouez, who blessed the ceremony.  M. Colbert sent instructions
+to M. Talon, the intendant of New France, to grant titles of nobility
+to Groseillers' nephew in order to keep him in the country.[12]  On the
+Saguenay was a Jesuit, Charles Albanel, loyal to the French and of
+English birth, whose devotion to the Indians during the small-pox
+scourge of 1670 had given him unbounded influence.  Talon, the
+intendant of New France, was keen to retrieve in the North what
+D'Argenson's injustice had lost.  Who could be better qualified to go
+overland to Hudson Bay than the old missionary, loyal to France, of
+English birth, and beloved by the Indians?  Albanel was summoned to
+Quebec and gladly accepted the commission.  He chose for companions
+Saint-Simon and young Couture, the son of the famous guide to the
+Jesuits.  The company left Quebec on August 6, 1671, and secured a
+guide at Tadoussac.  Embarking in canoes, they ascended the shadowy
+ca�on of the Saguenay to Lake St. John.  On the 7th of September they
+left the forest of Lake St. John and mounted the current of a winding
+river, full of cataracts and rapids, toward Mistassini.  On this stream
+they met Indians who told them that two European vessels were on Hudson
+Bay.  The Indians showed Albanel tobacco which they had received from
+the English.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seemed futile to go on a voyage of discovery where English were
+already in possession.  The priest sent one of the Frenchmen and two
+Indians back to Quebec for passports and instructions.  What the
+instructions were can only be guessed by subsequent developments.  The
+messengers left the depth of the forest on the 19th of September, and
+had returned from Quebec by the 10th of October.  Snow was falling.
+The streams had frozen, and the Indians had gone into camp for the
+winter.  Going from wigwam to wigwam through the drifted forest. Father
+Albanel passed the winter preaching to the savages.  Skins of the chase
+were laid on the wigwams.  Against the pelts, snow was banked to close
+up every chink.  Inside, the air was blue with smoke and the steam of
+the simmering kettle.  Indian hunters lay on the moss floor round the
+central fires.  Children and dogs crouched heterogeneously against the
+sloping tent walls.  Squaws plodded through the forest, setting traps
+and baiting the fish-lines that hung through airholes of the thick ice.
+In these lodges Albanel wintered.  He was among strange Indians and
+suffered incredible hardships.  Where there was room, he, too, sat
+crouched under the crowded tent walls, scoffed at by the braves, teased
+by the unrebuked children, eating when the squaws threw waste food to
+him, going hungry when his French companions failed to bring in game.
+Sometimes night overtook him on the trail.  Shovelling a bed through
+the snow to the moss with his snow-shoes, piling shrubs as a
+wind-break, and kindling a roaring fire, the priest passed the night
+under the stars.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When spring came, the Indians opposed his passage down the river.  A
+council was called.  Albanel explained that his message was to bring
+the Indians down to Quebec and keep them from going to the English for
+trade.  The Indians, who had acted as middlemen between Quebec traders
+and the Northern tribes, saw the advantage of undermining the English
+trade.  Gifts were presented by the Frenchmen, and the friendship of
+the Indians was secured.  On June 1, 1672, sixteen savages embarked
+with the three Frenchmen.  For the next ten days, the difficulties were
+almost insurmountable.  The river tore through a deep gorge of sheer
+precipices which the <I>voyageurs</I> could pass only by clinging to the
+rock walls with hands and feet.  One <I>portage</I> was twelve miles long
+over a muskeg of quaking moss that floated on water.  At every step the
+travellers plunged through to their waists.  Over this the long canoes
+and baggage had to be carried.  On the 10th of June they reached the
+height of land that divides the waters of Hudson Bay from the St.
+Lawrence.  The watershed was a small plateau with two lakes, one of
+which emptied north, the other, south.  As they approached Lake
+Mistassini, the Lake Indians again opposed their free passage down the
+rivers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must wait," they said, "till we notify the elders of your coming."
+Shortly afterwards, the French met a score of canoes with the Indians
+all painted for war.  The idea of turning back never occurred to the
+priest.  By way of demonstrating his joy at meeting the warriors, he
+had ten volleys of musketry fired off, which converted the war into a
+council of peace.  At the assemblage, Albanel distributed gifts to the
+savages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Stop trading with the English at the sea," he cried; "they do not pray
+to God; come to Lake St. John with your furs; there you will always
+find a <I>robe noire</I> to instruct you and baptize you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The treaty was celebrated by a festival and a dance.  In the morning,
+after solemn religious services, the French embarked.  On the 18th of
+June they came to Lake Mistassini, an enormous body of water similar to
+the Great Lakes.[13]  From Mistassini, the course was down-stream and
+easier.  High water enabled them to run many of the rapids; and on the
+28th of June, after a voyage of eight hundred leagues, four hundred
+rapids, and two hundred waterfalls, they came to the deserted houses of
+the English.  The very next day they found the Indians and held
+religious services, making solemn treaty, presenting presents, and
+hoisting the French flag.  For the first three weeks of July they
+coasted along the shores of James Bay, taking possession of the country
+in the name of the French king.  Then they cruised back to King Charles
+Fort on Rupert's River.[14]  They were just in time to meet the
+returned Englishmen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Governor Bayly of the Hudson's Bay Company was astounded to find the
+French at Rupert's River.  Now he knew what had allured the Indians
+from the bay, but he hardly relished finding foreigners in possession
+of his own fort.  The situation required delicate tact.  Governor Bayly
+was a bluff tradesman with an insular dislike of Frenchmen and
+Catholics common in England at a time when bigoted fanaticism ran riot.
+King Charles was on friendly terms with France.  Therefore, the
+Jesuit's passport must be respected; so Albanel was received with at
+least a show of courtesy.  But Bayly was the governor of a fur company;
+and the rights of the company must be respected.  To make matters
+worse, the French voyageurs brought letters to Groseillers and Radisson
+from their relatives in Quebec.  Bayly, no doubt, wished the Jesuit
+guest far enough.  Albanel left in a few weeks.  Then Bayly's
+suspicions blazed out in open accusations that the two French explorers
+had been playing a double game and acting against English interests.
+In September came the company ship to the fort with Captain Gillam, who
+had never agreed with Radisson from the time that they had quarrelled
+about going from Port Royal to the straits of Hudson Bay.  It has been
+said that, at this stage, Radisson and Groseillers, feeling the
+prejudice too strong against them, deserted and passed overland through
+the forests to Quebec.  The records of the Hudson's Bay Company do not
+corroborate this report.  Bayly in the heat of his wrath sent home
+accusations with the returning ship.  The ship that came out in 1674
+requested Radisson to go to England and report.  This he did, and so
+completely refuted the charges of disloyalty that in 1675 the company
+voted him 100 pounds a year; but Radisson would not sit quietly in
+England on a pension.  Owing to hostility toward him among the English
+employees of the company, he could not go back to the bay.  Meantime he
+had wife and family and servants to maintain on 100 pounds a year.  If
+England had no more need of him, France realized the fact that she had.
+Debts were accumulating.  Restless as a caged tiger, Radisson found
+himself baffled until a message came from the great Colbert of France,
+offering to pay all his debts and give him a position in the French
+navy.  His pardon was signed and proclaimed.  In 1676, France granted
+him fishing privileges on the island of Anticosti; but the lodestar of
+the fur trade still drew him, for that year he was called to Quebec to
+meet a company of traders conferring on the price of beaver.[15]  In
+that meeting assembled, among others, Jolliet, La Salle, Groseillers,
+and Radisson&mdash;men whose names were to become immortal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was plain that the two adventurers could not long rest.[16]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] Chailly-Bert.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] The Jesuit expeditions of Dablon and Dreuillettes in 1661 had
+failed to reach the bay overland.  Cabot had coasted Labrador in 1497;
+Captain Davis had gone north of Hudson Bay in 1585-1587; Hudson had
+lost his life there in 1610.  Sir Thomas Button had explored Baffin's
+Land, Nelson River, and the Button Islands in 1612; Munck, the Dane,
+had found the mouth of the Churchill River in 1619, James and Fox had
+explored the inland sea in 1631; Shapley had brought a ship up from
+Boston in 1640; and Bourdon, the Frenchman, had gone up to the straits
+in 1656-1657.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] George Carr, writing to Lord Arlington on December 14, 1665, says:
+"Hearing some Frenchmen discourse in New England&nbsp;&#8230; of a great trade
+of beaver, and afterward making proof of what they had said, he thought
+them the best present he could possibly make his Majesty and persuaded
+them to come to England."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[4] Colonel Richard Nicolls, writing on July 31, 1665, says he
+"supposes Col. Geo. Cartwright is now at sea."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[5] It plainly could not have been written while <I>en route</I> across the
+Atlantic with Sir George Cartwright, for it records events after that
+time.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[6] Robson's <I>Hudson Bay</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[7] See Dr. N. E. Dionne, also Marie de l'Incarnation, but Sulte
+discredits this granting of a title.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[8] See Robson's <I>Hudson Bay</I>, containing reference to the journal kept
+by Gorst, Bayly's secretary, at Rupert Fort.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[9] See State Papers, Canadian Archives, 1676, January 26, Whitehall:
+Memorial of the Hudson Bay Company complaining of Albanel, a Jesuit,
+attempting to seduce Radisson and Groseillers from the company's
+services; in absence of ships pulling down the British ensign and
+tampering with the Indians.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[10] I am inclined to think that Albanel may not have been aware of the
+documents which he carried from Quebec to the traders being practically
+an offer to bribe Radisson and Groseillers to desert England.  Some
+accounts say that Albanel was accompanied by Groseillers' son, but I
+find no authority for this.  On the other hand, Albanel does not
+mention the Englishmen being present.  Just as Radisson and
+Groseillers, ten years before, had taken possession of the old house
+battered with bullets, so Albanel took possession of the deserted huts.
+Here is what his account says (Cramoisy edition of the <I>Relations</I>):
+"Le 28 June � peine avions nous avanc� un quart de lieue, que nous
+rencontrasmes � main gauche dans un petit ruisseau un heu avec ses
+agrez de dix ou dou tonneaux, qui portoit le Pavilion Anglois et la
+voile latine; del� � la port�e du fusil, nous entrasmes dans deux
+maisons desertes&nbsp;&#8230; nous rencontrasmes deux ou trois cabanes et un
+chien abandonn�.&#8230;"  His tampering with the Indians was simply the
+presentation of gifts to attract them to Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[11] See State Papers, Canadian Archives: M. Frontenac, the commander
+of French (?) king's troops at Hudson Bay, introduces and recommends
+Father Albanel.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[12] State Papers, Canadian Archives.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[13] For some years there were sensational reports that Mistassini was
+larger than Lake Superior.  Mr. Low, of the Canadian Geological Survey,
+in a very exhaustive report, shows this is not so.  Still, the lake
+ranks with the large lakes of America.  Mr. Low gives its dimensions as
+one hundred miles long and twelve miles wide.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[14] There is a discrepancy in dates here which I leave savants to
+worry out.  <I>Albanel's Relation</I> (Cramoisy) is of 1672.  Thomas Gorst,
+secretary to Governor Bayly, says that the quarrel took place in 1674.
+Oldmixon, who wrote from hearsay, says in 1673.  Robson, who had access
+to Hudson's Bay records, says 1676; and I am inclined to think they all
+agree.  In a word, Radisson and Groseillers were on bad terms with the
+local Hudson's Bay Company governor from the first, and the open
+quarrel took place only in 1675.  Considering the bigotry of the times,
+the quarrel was only natural.  Bayly was governor, but he could not
+take precedence over Radisson and Groseillers.  He was Protestant and
+English.  They were Catholics and French.  Besides, they were really at
+the English governor's mercy; for they could not go back to Canada
+until publicly pardoned by the French king.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[15] State Papers, Canadian Archives, October 20, 1676, Quebec: Report
+of proceedings regarding the price of beaver&nbsp;&#8230; by an ordinance,
+October 19, 1676, M. Jacques Duchesneau, Intendant, had called a
+meeting of the leading fur traders to consult about fixing the price of
+beaver.  There were present, among others, Robert, Cavelier de la
+Salle,&nbsp;&#8230; Charles le Moyne,&nbsp;&#8230; two Godefroys of Three
+Rivers,&nbsp;&#8230; Groseillers,&nbsp;&#8230; Jolliet,&nbsp;&#8230; Pierre Radisson.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[16] Mr. Low's geological report on Labrador contains interesting
+particulars of the route followed by Father Albanel.  He speaks of the
+gorge and swamps and difficult <I>portages</I> in precisely the same way as
+the priest, though Albanel must have encountered the worst possible
+difficulties on the route, for he went down so early in the spring.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1682-1684
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RADISSON GIVES UP A CAREER IN THE NAVY FOR THE FUR TRADE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Though opposed by the Monopolists of Quebec, he secures Ships for a
+Voyage to Hudson Bay&mdash;Here he encounters a Pirate Ship from Boston and
+an English Ship of the Hudson's Bay Company&mdash;How he plays his Cards to
+win against Both Rivals
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+A clever man may be a dangerous rival.  Both France and England
+recognized this in Radisson.  The Hudson's Bay Company distrusted him
+because he was a foreigner.  The fur traders of Quebec were jealous.
+The Hudson's Bay Company had offered him a pension of 100 pounds a year
+to do nothing.  France had pardoned his secession to England, paid his
+debts, and given him a position in the navy, and when the fleet was
+wrecked returning from the campaign against Dutch possessions in the
+West Indies, the French king advanced money for Radisson to refit
+himself; but France distrusted the explorer because he had an English
+wife.  All that France and England wanted Radisson to do was to keep
+quiet.  What the haughty spirit of Radisson would <I>not</I> do for all the
+fortunes which two nations could offer to bribe him&mdash;was to keep quiet.
+He cared more for the game than the winnings; and the game of sitting
+still and drawing a pension for doing nothing was altogether too tame
+for Radisson.  Groseillers gave up the struggle and retired for the
+time to his family at Three Rivers.  At Quebec, in 1676, Radisson heard
+of others everywhere reaping where he had sown.  Jolliet and La Salle
+were preparing to push the fur trade of New France westward of the
+Great Lakes, where Radisson had penetrated twenty years previously.
+Fur traders of Quebec, who organized under the name of the Company of
+the North, yearly sent their canoes up the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and
+Saguenay to the forests south of Hudson Bay, which Radisson had
+traversed.  On the bay itself the English company were entrenched.
+North, northwest, and west, Radisson had been the explorer; but the
+reward of his labor had been snatched by other hands.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-151"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-151.jpg" ALT="&quot;Skin for Skin,&quot; Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay Company." BORDER="2" WIDTH="145" HEIGHT="202">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: "Skin for Skin," Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay Company.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Radisson must have served meritoriously on the fleet, for after the
+wreck he was offered the command of a man-of-war; but he asked for a
+commission to New France.  From this request there arose complications.
+His wife's family, the Kirkes, had held claims against New France from
+the days when the Kirkes of Boston had captured Quebec.  These claims
+now amounted to 40,000 pounds.  M. Colbert, the great French statesman,
+hesitated to give a commission to a man allied by marriage with the
+enemies of New France.  Radisson at last learned why preferment had
+been denied him.  It was on account of his wife.  Twice Radisson
+journeyed to London for Mary Kirke.  Those were times of an easy change
+in faith.  Charles II was playing double with Catholics and
+Protestants.  The Kirkes were closely attached to the court; and it
+was, perhaps, not difficult for the Huguenot wife to abjure
+Protestantism and declare herself a convert to the religion of her
+husband.  But when Radisson proposed taking her back to France, that
+was another matter.  Sir John Kirke forbade his daughter's departure
+till the claims of the Kirke family against New France had been paid.
+When Radisson returned without his wife, he was reproached by M.
+Colbert for disloyalty.  The government refused its patronage to his
+plans for the fur trade; but M. Colbert sent him to confer with La
+Chesnaye, a prominent fur trader and member of the Council in New
+France, who happened to be in Paris at that time.  La Chesnaye had been
+sent out to Canada to look after the affairs of a Rouen fur-trading
+company.  Soon he became a commissioner of the West Indies Company; and
+when the merchants of Quebec organized the Company of the North, La
+Chesnaye became a director.  No one knew better than he how bitterly
+the monopolists of Quebec would oppose Radisson's plans for a trip to
+Hudson Bay; but the prospects were alluring.  La Chesnaye was deeply
+involved in the fur trade and snatched at the chance of profits to
+stave off the bankruptcy that reduced him to beggary a few years later.
+In defiance of the rival companies and independent of those with which
+he was connected, he offered to furnish ships and share profits with
+Radisson and Groseillers for a voyage to Hudson Bay.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+M. Colbert did not give his patronage to the scheme; but he wished
+Radisson a God-speed.  The Jesuits advanced Radisson money to pay his
+passage; and in the fall of 1681, he arrived in Quebec.  La Chesnaye
+met him, and Groseillers was summoned.  The three then went to the
+Ch�teau Saint-Louis to lay their plans before the governor.  Though the
+privileges of the West Indies Company had been curtailed, the fur trade
+was again regulated by license.[1]  Frontenac had granted a license to
+the Company of the North for the fur trade of Hudson Bay.  He could not
+openly favor Radisson; but he winked at the expedition by granting
+passports to the explorers, and the three men who were to accompany
+him, Jean Baptiste, son of Groseillers, Pierre Allemand, the pilot who
+was afterward given a commission to explore the Eskimo country, and
+Jean Godefroy, an interpreter.[2]  Jean Baptiste, Radisson's nephew,
+invested 500 pounds in goods for barter.  Others of Three Rivers and
+Quebec advanced money, to provision the ship.[3]  Ten days after
+Radisson's arrival in Quebec, the explorers had left the high fortress
+of the St. Lawrence to winter in Acadia.  When spring came, they went
+with the fishing fleets to Isle Perc�e, where La Chesnaye was to send
+the ships.  Radisson's ship, the <I>St. Pierre</I>,&mdash;named after
+himself,&mdash;came first, a rickety sloop of fifty tons with a crew of
+twelve mutinous, ill-fed men, a cargo of goods for barter, and scant
+enough supply of provisions.  Groseillers' ship, the <I>St. Anne</I>, was
+smaller and better built, with a crew of fifteen.  The explorers set
+sail on the 11th of July.  From the first there was trouble with the
+crews.  Fresh-water <I>voyageurs</I> make bad ocean sailors.  Food was
+short.  The voyage was to be long.  It was to unknown waters, famous
+for disaster.  The sea was boisterous.  In the months of June and July,
+the North Atlantic is beset with fog and iceberg.  The ice sweeps south
+in mountainous bergs that have thawed and split before they reach the
+temperate zones.[4]  On the 30th of July the two ships passed the
+Straits of Belle Isle.  Fog-banks hung heavy on the blue of the far
+watery horizon.  Out of the fog, like ghosts in gloom, drifted the
+shadowy ice-floes.  The coast of Labrador consists of bare, domed,
+lonely hills alternated with rock walls rising sheer from the sea as
+some giant masonry.  Here the rock is buttressed by a sharp angle
+knife-edged in a precipice.  There, the beetling walls are guarded by
+long reefs like the teeth of a saw.  Over these reefs, the drifting
+tide breaks with multitudinous voices.  The French <I>voyageurs</I> had
+never known such seafaring.  In the wail of the white-foamed reefs,
+their superstition heard the shriek of the demons.  The explorers had
+anchored in one of the sheltered harbors, which the sailors call
+"holes-in-the-wall."  The crews mutinied.  They would go no farther
+through ice-drift and fog to an unknown sea.  Radisson never waited for
+the contagion of fear to work.  He ordered anchors up and headed for
+open sea.  Then he tried to encourage the sailors with promises.  They
+would not hear him; for the ship's galley was nearly empty of food.
+Then Radisson threatened the first mutineer to show rebellion with such
+severe punishment as the hard customs of the age permitted.  The crew
+sulked, biding its time.  At that moment the lookout shouted "Sail ho!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All hands discerned a ship with a strange sail, such as Dutch and
+Spanish pirates carried, bearing down upon them shoreward.  The lesser
+fear was forgotten in the greater.  The <I>St. Pierre's</I> crew crowded
+sail.  Heading about, the two explorers' ships threaded the rock reefs
+like pursued deer.  The pirate came on full speed before the wind.
+Night fell while Radisson was still hiding among the rocks.
+Notwithstanding reefs and high seas, while the pirate ship hove to for
+the night, Radisson stole out in the dark and gave his pursuer the
+slip.  The chase had saved him a mutiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the vessels drove northward, the ice drifted past like a white world
+afloat.  When Radisson approached the entrance to Hudson Bay, he met
+floes in impenetrable masses.  So far the ships had avoided delay by
+tacking along the edges of the ice-fields, from lake to lake of ocean
+surrounded by ice.  Now the ice began to crush together, driven by wind
+and tide with furious enough force to snap the two ships like
+egg-shells.  Radisson watched for a free passage, and, with a wind to
+rear, scudded for shelter of a hole-in-the-wall.  Here he met the
+Eskimo, and provisions were replenished; but the dangers of the
+ice-fields had frightened the crews again.  In two days Radisson put to
+sea to avoid a second mutiny.  The wind was landward, driving the ice
+back from the straits, and they passed safely into Hudson Bay.  The ice
+again surrounded them; but it was useless for the men to mutiny.  Ice
+blocked up all retreat.  Jammed among the floes, Groseillers was afraid
+to carry sail, and fell behind.  Radisson drove ahead, now skirting the
+ice-floes, now pounded by breaking icebergs, now crashing into surface
+brash or puddled ice to the fore.  "We were like to have perished," he
+writes, "but God was pleased to preserve us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the 26th of August, six weeks after sailing from Isle Perc�e,
+Radisson rode triumphantly in on the tide to Hayes River, south of
+Nelson River, where he had been with the English ships ten years
+before.  Two weeks later the <I>Ste. Anne</I>, with Groseillers, arrived.
+The two ships cautiously ascended the river, seeking a harbor.  Fifteen
+miles from salt water, Radisson anchored.  At last he was back in his
+native element, the wilderness, where man must set himself to conquer
+and take dominion over earth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Groseillers was always the trader, Radisson the explorer.  Leaving his
+brother-in-law to build the fort, Radisson launched a canoe on Hayes
+River to explore inland.  Young Jean Groseillers accompanied him to
+look after the trade with the Indians.[5]  For eight days they paddled
+up a river that was destined to be the path of countless traders and
+pioneers for two centuries, and that may yet be destined to become the
+path of a northern commerce.  By September the floodtide of Hayes River
+had subsided.  In a week the <I>voyageurs</I> had travelled probably three
+hundred miles, and were within the region of Lake Winnipeg, where the
+Cree hunters assemble in October for the winter.  Radisson had come to
+this region by way of Lake Superior with the Cree hunters twenty years
+before, and his visit had become a tradition among the tribes.  Beaver
+are busy in October gnawing down young saplings for winter food.
+Radisson observed chips floating past the canoe.  Where there are
+beaver, there should be Indians; so the <I>voyageurs</I> paddled on.  One
+night, as they lay round the camp-fire, with canoes overturned, a deer,
+startled from its evening drinking-place, bounded from the thicket.  A
+sharp whistle&mdash;and an Indian ran from the brush of an island opposite
+the camp, signalling the white men to head the deer back; but when
+Radisson called from the waterside, the savage took fright and dashed
+for the woods.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All that night the <I>voyageurs</I> kept sleepless guard.  In the morning
+they moved to the island and kindled a signal-fire to call the Indians.
+In a little while canoes cautiously skirted the island, and the chief
+of the band stood up, bow and arrow in hand.  Pointing his arrows to
+the deities of north, south, east, and west, he broke the shaft to
+splinters, as a signal of peace, and chanted his welcome:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Ho, young men, be not afraid!<BR>
+The sun is favorable to us!<BR>
+Our enemies shall fear us!<BR>
+This is the man we have wished<BR>
+Since the days of our fathers!"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+With a leap, the chief sprang into the water and swam ashore, followed
+by all the canoes.  Radisson called out to know who was commander.  The
+chief, with a sign as old and universal as humanity, bowed his head in
+servility.  Radisson took the Indian by the hand, and, seating him by
+the fire, chanted an answer in Cree:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"I know all the earth!<BR>
+Your friends shall be my friends!<BR>
+I come to bring you arms to destroy your enemies!<BR>
+Nor wife nor child shall die of hunger!<BR>
+For I have brought you merchandise!<BR>
+Be of good cheer!<BR>
+I will be thy son!<BR>
+I have brought thee a father!<BR>
+He is yonder below building a fort<BR>
+Where I have two great ships!" [6]<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The chief kept pace with the profuse compliments by vowing the life of
+his tribe in service of the white man.  Radisson presented pipes and
+tobacco to the Indians.  For the chief he reserved a fowling-piece with
+powder and shot.  White man and Indian then exchanged blankets.
+Presents were sent for the absent wives.  The savages were so grateful
+that they cast all their furs at Radisson's feet, and promised to bring
+their hunt to the fort in spring.  In Paris and London Radisson had
+been harassed by jealousy.  In the wilderness he was master of
+circumstance; but a surprise awaited him at Groseillers' fort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The French habitation&mdash;called Fort Bourbon&mdash;had been built on the north
+shore of Hayes or Ste. Therese River.  Directly north, overland, was
+another broad river with a gulflike entrance.  This was the Nelson.
+Between the two rivers ran a narrow neck of swampy, bush-grown land.
+The day that Radisson returned to the newly erected fort, there rolled
+across the marshes the ominous echo of cannon-firing.  Who could the
+newcomers be?  A week's sail south at the head of the bay were the
+English establishments of the Hudson's Bay Company.  The season was far
+advanced.  Had English ships come to winter on Nelson River?  Ordering
+Jean Groseillers to go back inland to the Indians, Radisson launched
+down Hayes River in search of the strange ship.  He went to the salt
+water, but saw nothing.  Upon returning, he found that Jean Groseillers
+had come back to the fort with news of more cannonading farther inland.
+Radisson rightly guessed that the ship had sailed up Nelson River,
+firing cannon as she went to notify Indians for trade.  Picking out
+three intrepid men, Radisson crossed the marsh by a creek which the
+Indian canoes used, to go to Nelson River.[7]  Through the brush the
+scout spied a white tent on an island.  All night the Frenchmen lay in
+the woods, watching their rivals and hoping that some workman might
+pass close enough to be seized and questioned.  At noon, next day,
+Radisson's patience was exhausted.  He paddled round the island, and
+showed himself a cannon-shot distant from the fort.  Holding up a pole,
+Radisson waved as if he were an Indian afraid to approach closer in
+order to trade.  The others hallooed a welcome and gabbled out Indian
+words from a guide-book.  Radisson paddled a length closer.  The others
+ran eagerly down to the water side away from their cannon.  In signal
+of friendship, they advanced unarmed.  Radisson must have laughed to
+see how well his ruse worked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who are you?" he demanded in plain English, "and what do you want?"
+The traders called back that they were Englishmen come for beaver.
+Again the crafty Frenchman must have laughed; for he knew very well
+that all English ships except those of the Hudson's Bay Company were
+prohibited by law from coming here to trade.[8]  Though the strange
+ship displayed an English ensign, the flag did not show the magical
+letters "H. B. C."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Whose commission have you?" pursued Radisson.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No commission&mdash;New Englanders," answered the others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Contrabands," thought Radisson to himself.  Then he announced that he
+had taken possession of all that country for France, had built a strong
+fort, and expected more ships.  In a word, he advised the New
+Englanders to save themselves by instant flight; but his canoe had
+glided nearer.  To Radisson's surprise, he discovered that the leader
+of the New England poachers was Ben Gillam of Boston, son of Captain
+Gillam, the trusted servant of the Hudson's Bay Company, who had
+opposed Radisson and Groseillers on Rupert's River.  It looked as if
+the contraband might be a venture of the father as well as the son.[9]
+Radisson and young Gillam recognized each other with a show of
+friendliness, Gillam inviting Radisson to inspect the ship with much
+the same motive that the fabled spider invited the fly.  Radisson took
+tactful precaution for his own liberty by graciously asking that two of
+the New England servants go down to the canoe with the three Frenchmen.
+No sooner had Radisson gone on the New England ship than young Gillam
+ordered cannon fired and English flags run up.  Having made that brave
+show of strength, the young man proposed that the French and the New
+Englanders should divide the traffic between them for the winter.
+Radisson diplomatically suggested that such an important proposal be
+laid before his colleagues.  In leaving, he advised Gillam to keep his
+men from wandering beyond the island, lest they suffer wrong at the
+hands of the French soldiers.  Incidentally, that advice would also
+keep the New Englanders from learning how desperately weak the French
+really were.  Neither leader was in the slightest deceived by the
+other; each played for time to take the other unawares, and each knew
+the game that was being played.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-163"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-163.jpg" ALT="Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from Tea Chest." BORDER="2" WIDTH="395" HEIGHT="161">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from Tea
+Chests at York Factory, each Coin representing so many Beaver Skins.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Instead of returning by the creek that cut athwart the neck of land
+between the two rivers, Radisson decided to go down Nelson River to the
+bay, round the point, and ascend Hayes River to the French quarters.
+Cogitating how to frighten young Gillam out of the country or else to
+seize him, Radisson glided down the swift current of Nelson River
+toward salt water.  He had not gone nine miles from the New Englanders
+when he was astounded by the spectacle of a ship breasting with
+full-blown sails up the tide of the Nelson directly in front of the
+French canoe.  The French dashed for the hiding of the brushwood on
+shore.  From their concealment they saw that the ship was a Hudson's
+Bay Company vessel, armed with cannon and commission for lawful trade.
+If once the Hudson's Bay Company ship and the New Englanders united,
+the English would be strong enough to overpower the French.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The majority of leaders would have escaped the impending disaster by
+taking ingloriously to their heels.  Radisson, with that adroit
+presence of mind which characterized his entire life, had provided for
+his followers' safety by landing them on the south shore, where the
+French could flee across the marsh to the ships if pursued.  Then his
+only thought was how to keep the rivals apart.  Instantly he had an
+enormous bonfire kindled.  Then he posted his followers in ambush.  The
+ship mistook the fire for an Indian signal, reefed its sails, and
+anchored.  Usually natives paddled out to the traders' ships to barter.
+These Indians kept in hiding.  The ship waited for them to come; and
+Radisson waited for the ship's hands to land.  In the morning a gig
+boat was lowered to row ashore.  In it were Captain Gillam, Radisson's
+personal enemy, John Bridgar,[10] the new governor of the Hudson's Bay
+Company for Nelson River, and six sailors.  All were heavily armed, yet
+Radisson stood alone to receive them, with his three companions posted
+on the outskirts of the woods as if in command of ambushed forces.
+Fortune is said to favor the dauntless, and just as the boat came
+within gunshot of the shore, it ran aground.  A sailor jumped out to
+drag the craft up the bank.  They were all at Radisson's mercy&mdash;without
+cover.  He at once levelled his gun with a shout of "Halt!"  At the
+same moment his own men made as if to sally from the woods.  The
+English imagined themselves ambushed, and called out that they were the
+officers of the Hudson's Bay Company.  Radisson declared who he was and
+that he had taken possession of the country for France.  His musket was
+still levelled.  His men were ready to dash forward.  The English put
+their heads together and decided that discretion was the better part of
+valor.  Governor Bridgar meekly requested permission to land and salute
+the commander of the French.  Then followed a pompous melodrama of
+bravado, each side affecting sham strength.  Radisson told the English
+all that he had told the New Englanders, going on board the Company's
+ship to dine, while English hostages remained with his French
+followers.  For reasons which he did not reveal, he strongly advised
+Governor Bridgar not to go farther up Nelson River.  Above all, he
+warned Captain Gillam not to permit the English sailors to wander
+inland.  Having exchanged compliments, Radisson took gracious leave of
+his hosts, and with his three men slipped down the Nelson in their
+canoe.  Past a bend in the river, he ordered the canoe ashore.  The
+French then skirted back through the woods and lay watching the English
+till satisfied that the Hudson's Bay Company ship would go no nearer
+the island where Ben Gillam lay hidden.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Groseillers and his son looked after the trade that winter.  Radisson
+had his hands full keeping the two English crews apart.  Ten days after
+his return, he again left Hayes River to see what his rivals were
+doing.  The Hudson's Bay Company ship had gone aground in the ooze a
+mile from the fort where Governor Bridgar had taken up quarters.  That
+division of forces weakened the English fort.  Introducing his man as
+captain of a French ship, Radisson entered the governor's house.  The
+visitors drained a health to their host and fired off muskets to learn
+whether sentinels were on guard.  No attention was paid to the unwonted
+noise.  "I judged," writes Radisson, "that they were careless, and
+might easily be surprised."  He then went across to the river flats,
+where the tide had left the vessel, and, calmly mounting the ladder,
+took a survey of Gillam's ship.  When the irate old captain rushed up
+to know the meaning of the intrusion Radisson suavely proffered
+provisions, of which they were plainly in need.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The New Englanders had been more industrious.  A stoutly palisaded fort
+had been completed on young Gillam's island, and cannon commanded all
+approach.  Radisson fired a musket to notify the sentry, and took care
+to beach his canoe below the range of the guns.  Young Gillam showed a
+less civil front than before.  His lieutenant ironically congratulated
+Radisson on his "safe" return, and invited him to visit the fort if he
+would enter <I>alone</I>.  When Radisson would have introduced his four
+followers, the lieutenant swore "if the four French were forty devils,
+they could not take the New Englanders' fort."  The safety of the
+French habitation now hung by a hair.  Everything depended on keeping
+the two English companies apart, and they were distant only nine miles.
+The scheme must have flashed on Radisson in an intuition; for he laid
+his plans as he listened to the boastings of the New Englanders.  If
+father and son could be brought together through Radisson's favor,
+Captain Gillam would keep the English from coming to the New England
+fort lest his son should be seized for poaching on the trade of the
+Company; and Ben Gillam would keep his men from going near the English
+fort lest Governor Bridgar should learn of the contraband ship from
+Boston.  Incidentally, both sides would be prevented from knowing the
+weakness of the French at Fort Bourbon.  At once Radisson told young
+Gillam of his father's presence.  Ben was eager to see his father and,
+as he thought, secure himself from detection in illegal trade.
+Radisson was to return to the old captain with the promised provisions.
+He offered to take young Gillam, disguised as a bush-ranger.  In
+return, he demanded (1) that the New Englanders should not leave their
+fort; (2) that they should not betray themselves by discharging cannon;
+(3) that they shoot any Hudson's Bay Company people who tried to enter
+the New England fort.  To young Gillam these terms seemed designed for
+his own protection.  What they really accomplished was the complete
+protection of the French from united attack.  Father and son would have
+put themselves in Radisson's power.  A word of betrayal to Bridgar, the
+Hudson's Bay governor, and both the Gillams would be arrested for
+illegal trade.  Ben Gillam's visit to his father was fraught with all
+the danger that Radisson's daring could have desired.  A seaman half
+suspected the identity of the bush-ranger, and Governor Bridgar wanted
+to know how Radisson had returned so soon when the French fort was far
+away.  "I told him, smiling," writes Radisson, "that I could fly when
+there was need to serve my friends."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Young Gillam had begun to suspect the weakness of the French.  When the
+two were safely out of the Hudson's Bay Company fort, he offered to go
+home part of the way with Radisson.  This was to learn where the French
+fort lay.  Radisson declined the kindly service and deliberately set
+out from the New Englanders' island in the wrong direction, coming down
+the Nelson past young Gillam's fort at night.  The delay of the trick
+nearly cost Radisson his life.  Fall rains had set in, and the river
+was running a mill-race.  Great floes of ice from the North were
+tossing on the bay at the mouth of the Nelson River in a maelstrom of
+tide and wind.  In the dark Radisson did not see how swiftly his canoe
+had been carried down-stream.  Before he knew it his boat shot out of
+the river among the tossing ice-floes of the bay.  Surrounded by ice in
+a wild sea, he could not get back to land.  The spray drove over the
+canoe till the Frenchman's clothes were stiff with ice.  For four hours
+they lay jammed in the ice-drift till a sudden upheaval crushed the
+canoe to kindling wood and left the men stranded on the ice.  Running
+from floe to floe, they gained the shore and beat their way for three
+days through a raging hurricane of sleet and snow toward the French
+habitation.  They were on the side of the Hayes opposite the French
+fort.  Four <I>voyageurs</I> crossed for them, and the little company at
+last gained the shelter of a roof.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson now knew that young Gillam intended to spy upon the French; so
+he sent scouts to watch the New Englanders' fort.  The scouts reported
+that the young captain had sent messengers to obtain additional men
+from his father; but the New England soldiers, remembering Radisson's
+orders to shoot any one approaching, had levelled muskets to fire at
+the re�nforcements.  The rebuffed men had gone back to Governor Bridgar
+with word of a fort and ship only nine miles up Nelson River.  Bridgar
+thought this was the French establishment, and old Captain Gillam could
+not undeceive him.  The Hudson's Bay Company governor had sent the two
+men back to spy on what he thought was a French fort.  At once Radisson
+sent out men to capture Bridgar's scouts, who were found half dead with
+cold and hunger.  The captives reported to Radisson that the English
+ship had been totally wrecked in the ice jam.  Bridgar's people were
+starving.  Many traders would have left their rivals to perish.
+Radisson supplied them with food for the winter.  They were no longer
+to be feared; but there was still danger from young Gillam.  He had
+wished to visit the French fort.  Radisson decided to give him an
+opportunity.  Ben Gillam was escorted down to Hayes River.  A month
+passed quietly.  The young captain had learned that the boasted forces
+of the French consisted of less than thirty men.  His insolence knew no
+bounds.  He struck a French servant, called Radisson a pirate, and
+gathering up his belongings prepared to go home.  Radisson quietly
+barred the young man's way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You pitiful dog!" said the Frenchman, coolly.  "You poor young fool!
+Why do you suppose you were brought to this fort?  We brought you here
+because it suited us!  We keep you here as long as it suits us!  We
+take you back when it suits us!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ben Gillam was dumfounded to find that he had been trapped, when he had
+all the while thought that he was acting the part of a clever spy.  He
+broke out in a storm of abuse.  Radisson remanded the foolish young man
+to a French guard.  At the mess-room table Radisson addressed his
+prisoner:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Gillam, to-day I set out to capture your fort."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the table sat less than thirty men.  Young Gillam gave one scornful
+glance at the French faces and laughed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you had a hundred men instead of twenty," he jeered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How many have you, Ben?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nine; and they'll kill you before you reach the palisades."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson was not talking of killing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Gillam," he returned imperturbably, "pick out nine of my men, and I
+have your fort within forty-eight hours."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gillam chose the company, and Radisson took one of the Hudson Bay
+captives as a witness.  The thing was done as easily as a piece of
+farcical comedy.  French hostages had been left among the New
+Englanders as guarantee of Gillam's safety in Radisson's fort.  These
+hostages had been instructed to drop, as if by chance, blocks of wood
+across the doors of the guard-room and powder house and barracks.  Even
+these precautions proved unnecessary.  Two of Radisson's advance guard,
+who were met by the lieutenant of the New England fort, reported that
+"Gillam had remained behind."  The lieutenant led the two Frenchmen
+into the fort.  These two kept the gates open for Radisson, who marched
+in with his band, unopposed.  The keys were delivered and Radisson was
+in possession.  At midnight the watch-dogs raised an alarm, and the
+French sallied out to find that a New Englander had run to the Hudson's
+Bay Company for aid, and Governor Bridgar's men were attacking the
+ships.  All of the assailants fled but four, whom Radisson caught
+ransacking the ship's cabin.  Radisson now had more captives than he
+could guard, so he loaded the Hudson's Bay Company men with provisions
+and sent them back to their own starving fort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson left the New England fort in charge of his Frenchmen and
+returned to the French quarters.  Strange news was carried to him
+there.  Bridgar had forgotten all benefits, waited until Radisson's
+back was turned, and, with one last desperate cast of the die to
+retrieve all by capturing the New England fort and ship for the fur
+company, had marched against young Gillam's island.  The French threw
+open the gates for the Hudson's Bay governor to enter.  Then they
+turned the key and told Governor Bridgar that he was a prisoner.  Their
+<I>coup</I> was a complete triumph for Radisson.  Both of his rivals were
+prisoners, and the French flag flew undisputed over Port Nelson.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Spring brought the Indians down to the bay with the winter's hunt.  The
+sight of threescore Englishmen captured by twenty Frenchmen roused the
+war spirit of the young braves.  They offered Radisson two hundred
+beaver skins to be allowed to massacre the English.  Radisson thanked
+the savages for their good will, but declined their offer.  Floods had
+damaged the water-rotted timbers of the two old hulls in which the
+explorers voyaged north.  It was agreed to return to Quebec in Ben
+Gillam's boat.  A vessel was constructed on one of the hulls to send
+the English prisoners to the Hudson's Bay Company forts at the south
+end of the bay.[11]  Young Jean Groseillers was left, with seven men,
+to hold the French post till boats came in the following year.  On the
+27th of July the ships weighed anchor for the homeward voyage.  Young
+Gillam was given a free passage by way of Quebec.  Bridgar was to have
+gone with his men to the Hudson's Bay Company forts at the south of the
+bay, but at the last moment a friendly Englishman warned Radisson that
+the governor's design was to wait till the large ship had left, head
+the bark back for Hayes River, capture the fort, and put the Frenchmen
+to the sword.  To prevent this Bridgar, too, was carried to Quebec.
+Twenty miles out the ship was caught in ice-floes that held her for a
+month, and Bridgar again conspired to cut the throats of the Frenchmen.
+Henceforth young Gillam and Bridgar were out on parole during the day
+and kept under lock at night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The same jealousy as of old awaited Radisson at Quebec.  The Company of
+the North was furious that La Chesnaye had sent ships to Hudson Bay,
+which the shareholders considered to be their territory by license.[12]
+Farmers of the Revenue beset the ship to seize the cargo, because the
+explorers had gone North without a permit.  La Chesnaye saved some of
+the furs by transshipping them for France before the vessel reached
+Quebec.  Then followed an interminable lawsuit, that exhausted the
+profits of the voyage.  La Barre had succeeded Frontenac as governor.
+The best friends of La Barre would scarcely deny that his sole ambition
+as governor was to amass a fortune from the fur trade of Canada.
+Inspired by the jealous Company of the North, he refused to grant
+Radisson prize money for the capture of the contraband ship, restored
+the vessel to Gillam, and gave him clearance to sail for Boston.[13]
+For this La Barre was sharply reprimanded from France; but the
+reprimand did not mend the broken fortunes of the two explorers, who
+had given their lives for the extension of the French domain.[14]  M.
+Colbert summoned Radisson and Groseillers to return to France and give
+an account of all they had done; but when they arrived in Paris, on
+January 15, 1684, they learned that the great statesman had died.  Lord
+Preston, the English envoy, had lodged such complaints against them for
+the defeat of the Englishmen in Hudson Bay, that France hesitated to
+extend public recognition of their services.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] Within ten years so many different regulations were promulgated on
+the fur trade that it is almost impossible to keep track of them.  In
+1673 orders came from Paris forbidding French settlers of New France
+from wandering in the woods for longer than twenty-four hours.  In 1672
+M. Frontenac forbade the selling of merchandise to <I>coureurs du bois</I>,
+or the purchase of furs from them.  In 1675 a decree of the Council of
+State awarded to M. Jean Oudiette one-fourth of all beaver, with the
+exclusive right of buying and selling in Canada.  In 1676 Frontenac
+withdrew from the <I>Cie Indes Occidentales</I> all the rights it had over
+Canada and other places.  An ordinance of October 1, 1682, forbade all
+trade except under license.  An ordinance in 1684 ordered all fur
+traders trading in Hudson Bay to pay one-fourth to Farmers of the
+Revenue.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] It is hard to tell who this Godefroy was.  Of all the famous
+Godefroys of Three Rivers (according to Abb� Tanguay) there was only
+one, Jean Batiste, born 1658, who might have gone with Radisson; but I
+hardly think so.  The Godefroys descended from the French nobility and
+themselves bore titles from the king, but in spite of this, were the
+best canoemen of New France, as ready&mdash;according to Mr. Sulte&mdash;to
+<I>faire la cuisine</I> as to command a fort.  Radisson's Godefroy evidently
+went in the capacity of a servant, for his name is not mentioned in the
+official list of promoters.  On the other hand, parish records do not
+give the date of Jean Batiste Godefroy's death; so that he may have
+gone as a servant and died in the North.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] State Papers, 1683, state that Dame Sorel, La Chesnaye, Chaujon,
+Gitton, Foret, and others advanced money for the goods.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[4] In 1898, when up the coast of Labrador, I was told by the
+superintendent of a northern whaling station&mdash;a man who has received
+royal decorations for his scientific research of ocean phenomena&mdash;that
+he has frequently seen icebergs off Labrador that were nine miles long.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[5] Jean was born in 1654 and was, therefore, twenty-eight.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[6] I have written both addresses as the Indians would chant them.  To
+be sure, they will not scan according to the elephantine grace of the
+pedant's iambics; but then, neither will the Indian songs scan, though
+I know of nothing more subtly rhythmical.  Rhythm is so much a part of
+the Indian that it is in his walk, in the intonation of his words, in
+the gesture of his hands.  I think most Westerners will bear me out in
+saying that it is the exquisitely musical intonation of words that
+betrays Indian blood to the third and fourth generation.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[7] See Robson's map.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[8] State Papers: "The Governor of New England is ordered to seize all
+vessels trading in Hudson Bay contrary to charter&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[9] <I>Radisson's Journal</I>, p. 277.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[10] Robson gives the commission to this governor.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[11] Later in Hudson Bay history, when another commander captured the
+forts, the prisoners were sold into slavery.  Radisson's treatment of
+his rivals hardly substantiates all the accusations of rascality
+trumped up against him.  Just how many prisoners he took in this
+<I>coup</I>, no two records agree.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[12] Archives, September 24, 1683: Ordinance of M. de Meulles regarding
+the claims of persons interested in the expedition to Hudson Bay,
+organized by M. de la Chesnaye, Gitton, Bruneau, Mme. Sorel.&#8230;  In
+order to avoid difficulties with the Company of the North, they had
+placed a vessel at Isle Perc�e to receive the furs brought back&nbsp;&#8230;
+and convey them to Holland and Spain.&#8230;  Joachims de Chalons, agent
+of the Company of the North, sent a <I>bateau</I> to Perc�e to defeat the
+project.  De la Chesnaye, summoned to appear before the intendant,
+maintained that the company had no right to this trade,&nbsp;&#8230; that the
+enterprise involved so many risks that he could not consent to divide
+the profits, if he had any.  The partners having been heard, M. de
+Meulles orders that the boats from Hudson Bay be anchored at Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[13] Archives, October 25, 1683: M. de la Barre grants Benjamin Gillam
+of Boston clearance for the ship <I>Le Gar�on</I>, now in port at Quebec,
+although he had no license from his Britannic Majesty permitting him to
+enter Hudson Bay.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[14] Such foundationless accusations have been written against Radisson
+by historians who ought to have known better, about these furs, that I
+quote the final orders of the government on the subject: November 5,
+1683, M. de la Barre forbids Chalons, agent of La Ferme du Canada,
+confiscating the furs brought from Hudson Bay; November 8 M. de la
+Chesnaye is to be paid for the furs seized.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1684-1710
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE LAST VOYAGE OF RADISSON TO HUDSON BAY
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+France refuses to restore the Confiscated Furs and Radisson tries to
+redeem his Fortune&mdash;Re�ngaged by England, he captures back Fort Nelson,
+but comes to Want in his Old Age&mdash;his Character
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Radisson was now near his fiftieth year.  He had spent his entire life
+exploring the wilds.  He had saved New France from bankruptcy with
+cargoes of furs that in four years amounted to half a million of modern
+money.  In ten years he had brought half a million dollars worth of
+furs to the English company.[1]  Yet he was a poor man, threatened with
+the sponging-house by clamorous creditors and in the power of
+avaricious statesmen, who used him as a tool for their own schemes.  La
+Chesnaye had saved his furs; but the half of the cargo that was the
+share of Radisson and Groseillers had been seized at Quebec.[2] On
+arriving in France, Groseillers presented a memorial of their wrong to
+the court.[3]  Probably because England and France were allied by
+treaty at that time, the petition for redress was ignored.  Groseillers
+was now an old man.  He left the struggle to Radisson and retired to
+spend his days in quietness.[4]  Radisson did not cease to press his
+claim for the return of confiscated furs.  He had a wife and four
+children to support; but, in spite of all his services to England and
+France, he did not own a shilling's worth of property in the whole
+world.  From January to May he waited for the tardy justice of the
+French court.  When his suit became too urgent, he was told that he had
+offended the Most Christian King by attacking the fur posts under the
+protection of a friendly monarch, King Charles.  The hollowness of that
+excuse became apparent when the French government sanctioned the
+fitting out of two vessels for Radisson to go to Hudson Bay in the
+spring.  Lord Preston, the English ambassador, was also playing a
+double game.  He never ceased to reproach the French for the
+destruction of the fur posts on Hudson Bay.  At the same time he
+besieged Radisson with offers to return to the service of the Hudson's
+Bay Company.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Radisson was deadly tired of the farce.  From first to last France had
+treated him with the blackest injustice.  If he had wished to be rich,
+he could long ago have accumulated wealth by casting in his lot with
+the dishonest rulers of Quebec.  In England a strong clique, headed by
+Bridgar, Gillam, and Bering opposed him; but King Charles and the Duke
+of York, Prince Rupert, when he was alive, Sir William Young, Sir James
+Hayes, and Sir John Kirke were in his favor.  His heart yearned for his
+wife and children.  Just then letters came from England urging him to
+return to the Hudson's Bay Company.  Lord Preston plied the explorer
+with fair promises.  Under threat of punishment for molesting the
+English of Hudson Bay, the French government tried to force him into a
+contract to sail on a second voyage to the North on the same terms as
+in 1682-1683&mdash;not to share the profits.  England and France were both
+playing double.  Radisson smiled a grim smile and took his resolution.
+Daily he conferred with the French Marine on details of the voyage.  He
+permitted the date of sailing to be set for April 24.  Sailors were
+enlisted, stores put on board, everything was in readiness.  At the
+last moment, Radisson asked leave of absence to say good-by to his
+family.  The request was granted.  Without losing a moment, he sailed
+for England, where he arrived on the 10th of May and was at once taken
+in hand by Sir William Young and Sir James Hayes.  He was honored as
+his explorations entitled him to be.  King Charles and the Duke of York
+received him.  Both royal brothers gave him gifts in token of
+appreciation.  He took the oath of fealty and cast in his lot with the
+English for good.  It was characteristic of the enthusiast that he was,
+when Radisson did not sign a strictly business contract with the
+Hudson's Bay Company.  "I accepted their commission with the greatest
+pleasure in the world," he writes; ". . . without any precautions on my
+part for my own interests&nbsp;&#8230; since they had confidence in me, I
+wished to be generous towards them&nbsp;&#8230; in the hope they would render
+me all the justice due from gentlemen of honor and probity."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But to the troubles of the future Radisson always paid small heed.
+Glad to be off once more to the adventurous freedom of the wilds, he
+set sail from England on May 17, 1684, in the <I>Happy Return</I>,
+accompanied by two other vessels.  No incident marked the voyage till
+the ships had passed through the straits and were driven apart by the
+ice-drift of the bay.  About sixty miles out from Port Nelson, the
+<I>Happy Return</I> was held back by ice.  Fearing trouble between young
+Jean Groseillers' men and the English of the other ships, Radisson
+embarked in a shallop with seven men in order to arrive at Hayes River
+before the other boats came.  Rowing with might and main for
+forty-eight hours, they came to the site of the French fort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fort had been removed.  Jean Groseillers had his own troubles
+during Radisson's absence.  A few days after Radisson's departure in
+July, 1683, cannon announced the arrival of the annual English ships on
+Nelson River.  Jean at once sent out scouts, who found a tribe of
+Indians on the way home from trading with the ships that had fired the
+cannon.  The scouts brought the Indians back to the French fort.  Young
+Groseillers admitted the savages only one at a time; but the cunning
+braves pretended to run back for things they had forgotten in the
+French house.  Suspecting nothing, Jean had permitted his own men to
+leave the fort.  On different pretexts, a dozen warriors had surrounded
+the young trader.  Suddenly the mask was thrown off.  Springing up,
+treacherous as a tiger cat, the chief of the band struck at Groseillers
+with a dagger.  Jean parried the blow, grabbed the redskin by his
+collar of bears' claws strung on thongs, threw the assassin to the
+ground almost strangling him, and with one foot on the villain's throat
+and the sword point at his chest, demanded of the Indians what they
+meant.  The savages would have fled, but French soldiers who had heard
+the noise dashed to Groseillers' aid.  The Indians threw down their
+weapons and confessed all: the Englishmen of the ship had promised the
+band a barrel of powder to massacre the French.  Jean took his foot
+from the Indian's throat and kicked him out of the fort.  The English
+outnumbered the French; so Jean removed his fort farther from the bay,
+among the Indians, where the English could not follow.  To keep the
+warriors about him, he offered to house and feed them for the winter.
+This protected him from the attacks of the English.  In the spring
+Indians came to the French with pelts.  Jean was short of firearms; so
+he bribed the Indians to trade their peltries to the English for guns,
+and to retrade the guns to him for other goods.  It was a stroke worthy
+of Radisson himself, and saved the little French fort.  The English
+must have suspected the young trader's straits, for they again paid
+warriors to attack the French; but Jean had forestalled assault by
+forming an alliance with the Assiniboines, who came down Hayes River
+from Lake Winnipeg four hundred strong, and encamped a body-guard
+around the fort.  Affairs were at this stage when Radisson arrived with
+news that he had transferred his services to the English.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Young Groseillers was amazed.[5]  Letters to his mother show that he
+surrendered his charge with a very ill grace.  "Do not forget,"
+Radisson urged him, "the injuries that France has inflicted on your
+father."  Young Groseillers' mother, Marguerite Hayet, was in want at
+Three Rivers.[6]  It was memory of her that now turned the scales with
+the young man.  He would turn over the furs to Radisson for the English
+Company, if Radisson would take care of the far-away mother at Three
+Rivers.  The bargain was made, and the two embraced.  The surrender of
+the French furs to the English Company has been represented as
+Radisson's crowning treachery.  Under that odium the great discoverer's
+name has rested for nearly three centuries; yet the accusation of theft
+is without a grain of truth.  Radisson and Groseillers were to obtain
+half the proceeds of the voyage in 1682-1683.  Neither the explorers
+nor Jean Groseillers, who had privately invested 500 pounds in the
+venture, ever received one sou.  The furs at Port Nelson&mdash;or Fort
+Bourbon&mdash;belonged to the Frenchmen, to do what they pleased with them.
+The act of the enthusiast is often tainted with folly.  That Radisson
+turned over twenty thousand beaver pelts to the English, without the
+slightest assurance that he would be given adequate return, was surely
+folly; but it was not theft.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The transfer of all possessions to the English was promptly made.
+Radisson then arranged a peace treaty between the Indians and the
+English.  That peace treaty has endured between the Indians and the
+Hudson's Bay Company to this day.  A new fort was built, the furs
+stored in the hold of the vessels, and the crews mustered for the
+return voyage.  Radisson had been given a solemn promise by the
+Hudson's Bay Company that Jean Groseillers and his comrades should be
+well treated and re�ngaged for the English at 100 pounds a year.  Now
+he learned that the English intended to ship all the French out of
+Hudson Bay and to keep them out.  The enthusiast had played his game
+with more zeal than discretion.  The English had what they wanted&mdash;furs
+and fort.  In return, Radisson had what had misled him like a
+will-o'-the-wisp all his life&mdash;vague promises.  In vain Radisson
+protested that he had given his promise to the French before they
+surrendered the fort.  The English distrusted foreigners.  The
+Frenchmen had been mustered on the ships to receive last instructions.
+They were told that they were to be taken to England.  No chance was
+given them to escape.  Some of the French had gone inland with the
+Indians.  Of Jean's colony, these alone remained.  When Radisson
+realized the conspiracy, he advised his fellow-countrymen to make no
+resistance; for he feared that some of the English bitter against him
+might seize on the pretext of a scuffle to murder the French.  His
+advice proved wise.  He had strong friends at the English court, and
+atonement was made for the breach of faith to the French.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The ships set sail on the 4th of September and arrived in England on
+the 23d of October.  Without waiting for the coach, Radisson hired a
+horse and spurred to London in order to give his version first of the
+quarrel on the bay.  The Hudson's Bay Company was delighted with the
+success of Radisson.  He was taken before the directors, given a
+present of a hundred guineas, and thanked for his services.  He was
+once more presented to the King and the Duke of York.  The company
+redeemed its promise to Radisson by employing the Frenchmen of the
+surrendered fort and offering to engage young Groseillers at 100 pounds
+a year.[7]
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-187"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-187.jpg" ALT="Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower Fort Garry." BORDER="2" WIDTH="392" HEIGHT="341">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower
+Fort Garry, Red River.  (Courtesy of C. C. Chipman, Commissioner H. B.
+Company.)]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+For five years the English kept faith with Radisson, and he made annual
+voyages to the bay; but war broke out with France.  New France entered
+on a brilliant campaign against the English of Hudson Bay.  The
+company's profits fell.  Radisson, the Frenchman, was distrusted.
+France had set a price on his head, and one Martini�re went to Port
+Nelson to seize him, but was unable to cope with the English.  At no
+time did Radisson's salary with the company exceed 100 pounds; and now,
+when war stopped dividends on the small amount of stock which had been
+given to him, he fell into poverty and debt.  In 1692 Sir William Young
+petitioned the company in his favor; but a man with a price on his head
+for treason could plainly not return to France.[8]  The French were in
+possession of the bay.  Radisson could do no harm to the English.
+Therefore the company ignored him till he sued them and received
+payment in full for arrears of salary and dividends on stock which he
+was not permitted to sell; but 50 pounds a year would not support a man
+who paid half that amount for rent, and had a wife, four children, and
+servants to support.  In 1700 Radisson applied for the position of
+warehouse keeper for the company at London.  Even this was denied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dauntless pathfinder was growing old; and the old cannot fight and
+lose and begin again as Radisson had done all his life.  State Papers
+of Paris contain records of a Radisson with Tonty at Detroit![9]  Was
+this his nephew, Fran�ois Radisson's son, who took the name of the
+explorer, or Radisson's own son, or the game old warrior himself, come
+out to die on the frontier as he had lived?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+History is silent.  Until the year 1710 Radisson drew his allowance of
+50 pounds a year from the English Company, then the payments stopped.
+Did the dauntless life stop too?  Oblivion hides all record of his
+death, as it obscured the brilliant achievements of his life.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+There is no need to point out Radisson's faults.  They are written on
+his life without extenuation or excuse, so that all may read.  There is
+less need to eulogize his virtues.  They declare themselves in every
+act of his life.  This, only, should be remembered.  Like all
+enthusiasts, Radisson could not have been a hero, if he had not been a
+bit of a fool.  If he had not had his faults, if he had not been as
+impulsive, as daring, as reckless, as inconstant, as improvident of the
+morrow, as a savage or a child, he would not have accomplished the
+exploration of half a continent.  Men who weigh consequences are not of
+the stuff to win empires.  Had Radisson haggled as to the means, he
+would have missed or muddled the end.  He went ahead; and when the way
+did not open, he went round, or crawled over, or carved his way through.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was an old saying among retired hunters of Three Rivers that "one
+learned more in the woods than was ever found in l' petee
+cat-ee-cheesm."  Radisson's training was of the woods, rather than the
+cur�'s catechism; yet who that has been trained to the strictest code
+may boast of as dauntless faults and noble virtues?  He was not
+faithful to any country, but he was faithful to his wife and children;
+and he was "faithful to his highest hope,"&mdash;that of becoming a
+discoverer,&mdash;which is more than common mortals are to their meanest
+aspirations.  When statesmen played him a double game, he paid them
+back in their own coin with compound interest.  Perhaps that is why
+they hated him so heartily and blackened his memory.  But amid all the
+mad license of savage life, Radisson remained untainted.  Other
+explorers and statesmen, too, have left a trail of blood to perpetuate
+their memory; Radisson never once spilled human blood needlessly, and
+was beloved by the savages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Memorial tablets commemorate other discoverers.  Radisson needs none.
+The Great Northwest is his monument for all time.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] Radisson's petition to the Hudson's Bay Company gives these amounts.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] See State Papers quoted in Chapter VI.  I need scarcely add that
+Radisson did not steal a march on his patrons by secretly shipping furs
+to Europe.  This is only another of the innumerable slanders against
+Radisson which State Papers disprove.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] It seems impossible that historians with the slightest regard for
+truth should have branded this part of <I>Radisson's Relation</I> as a
+fabrication, too.  Yet such is the case, and of writers whose books are
+supposed to be reputable.  Since parts of Radisson's life appeared in
+the magazines, among many letters I received one from a well-known
+historian which to put it mildly was furious at the acceptance of
+<I>Radisson's Journal</I> as authentic.  In reply, I asked that historian
+how many documents contemporaneous with Radisson's life he had
+consulted before he branded so great an explorer as Radisson as a liar.
+Needless to say, that question was not answered.  In corroboration of
+this part of Radisson's life, I have lying before me: (1) Chouart's
+letters&mdash;see Appendix.  (2) A letter of Frontenac recording Radisson's
+first trip by boat for De la Chesnaye and the complications it would be
+likely to cause.  (3) A complete official account sent from Quebec to
+France of Radisson's doings in the bay, which tallies in every respect
+with <I>Radisson's Journal</I>.  (4) Report of M. de Meulles to the Minister
+on the whole affair with the English and New Englanders.  (5) An
+official report on the release of Gillam's boat at Quebec.  (6) The
+memorial presented by Groseillers to the French minister.  (7) An
+official statement of the first discovery of the bay overland.  (8) A
+complete statement (official) of the complications created by
+Radisson's wife being English.  (9) A statement through a third
+party&mdash;presumably an official&mdash;by Radisson himself of these
+complications dated 1683.  (10) A letter from the king to the governor
+at Quebec retailing the English complaints of Radisson at Nelson River.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+In the face of this, what is to be said of the historian who calls
+Radisson's adventures "a fabrication"?  Such misrepresentation betrays
+about equal amounts of impudence and ignorance.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[4] From Charlevoix to modern writers mention is made of the death of
+these two explorers.  Different names are given as the places where
+they died.  This is all pure supposition.  Therefore I do not quote.
+No records exist to prove where Radisson and Groseillers died.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[5] See Appendix.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[6] State Papers record payment of money to her because she was in want.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[7] Dr. George Bryce, who is really the only scholar who has tried to
+unravel the mystery of Radisson's last days, supplies new facts about
+his dealings with the Company to 1710.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[8] Marquis de Denonville ordered the arrest of Radisson wherever he
+might be found.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[9] Appendix; see State Papers.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART II
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA: BEING AN
+ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE ROCKY
+MOUNTAINS, THE MISSOURI UPLANDS, AND THE
+VALLEY OF THE SASKATCHEWAN
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VIII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1730-1750
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA[1]
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+M. de la V�rendrye continues the Exploration of the Great Northwest by
+establishing a Chain of Fur Posts across the Continent&mdash;Privations of
+the Explorers and the Massacre of Twenty Followers&mdash;His Sons visit the
+Mandans and discover the Rockies&mdash;The Valley of the Saskatchewan is
+next explored, but Jealousy thwarts the Explorer, and he dies in Poverty
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1731-1736
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+A curious paradox is that the men who have done the most for North
+America did not intend to do so.  They set out on the far quest of a
+crack-brained idealist's dream.  They pulled up at a foreshortened
+purpose; but the unaccomplished aim did more for humanity than the
+idealist's dream.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Columbus set out to find Asia.  He discovered America.  Jacques Cartier
+sought a mythical passage to the Orient.  He found a northern empire.
+La Salle thought to reach China.  He succeeded only in exploring the
+valley of the Mississippi, but the new continent so explored has done
+more for humanity than Asia from time immemorial.  Of all crack-brained
+dreams that led to far-reaching results, none was wilder than the
+search for the Western Sea.  Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had
+followed the trail that Radisson had blazed and explored the valley of
+the Mississippi; but like a will-o'-the-wisp beckoning ever westward
+was that undiscovered myth, the Western Sea, thought to lie like a
+narrow strait between America and Japan.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The search began in earnest one sweltering afternoon on June 8, 1731,
+at the little stockaded fort on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where
+Montreal stands to-day.  Fifty grizzled adventurers&mdash;wood runners,
+voyageurs, Indian interpreters&mdash;bareheaded, except for the colored
+handkerchief binding back the lank hair, dressed in fringed buckskin,
+and chattering with the exuberant nonchalance of boys out of school,
+had finished gumming the splits of their ninety-foot birch canoes, and
+now stood in line awaiting the coming of their captain, Sieur Pierre
+Gaultier de Varennes de la V�rendrye.  The French soldier with his
+three sons, aged respectively eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen, now
+essayed to discover the fabled Western Sea, whose narrow waters were
+supposed to be between the valley of the "Great Forked River" and the
+Empire of China.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-194"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-194.jpg" ALT="Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight." BORDER="2" WIDTH="404" HEIGHT="648">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Certainly, if it were worth while for Peter the Great of Russia to send
+Vitus Bering coasting the bleak headlands of ice-blocked, misty shores
+to find the Western Sea, it would&mdash;as one of the French governors
+reported&mdash;"be nobler than open war" for the little colony of New France
+to discover this "sea of the setting sun."  The quest was invested with
+all the rainbow tints of "<I>la gloire</I>"; but the rainbow hopes were
+founded on the practical basis of profits.  Leading merchants of
+Montreal had advanced goods for trade with the Indians on the way to
+the Western Sea.  Their expectations of profits were probably the same
+as the man's who buys a mining share for ten cents and looks for
+dividends of several thousand per cent.  And the fur trade at that time
+was capable of yielding such profits.  Traders had gone West with less
+than $2000 worth of goods in modern money, and returned three years
+later with a sheer profit of a quarter of a million.  Hope of such
+returns added zest to De la V�rendrye's venture for the discovery of
+the Western Sea.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Goods done up in packets of a hundred pounds lay at the feet of the
+<I>voyageurs</I> awaiting De la V�rendrye's command.  A dozen soldiers in
+the plumed hats, slashed buskins, the brightly colored doublets of the
+period, joined the motley company.  Priests came out to bless the
+departing <I>voyageurs</I>.  Chapel bells rang out their God-speed.  To the
+booming of cannon, and at a word from De la V�rendrye, the gates
+opened.  Falling in line with measured tread, the soldiers marched out
+from Mount Royal.  Behind, in the ambling gait of the moccasined
+woodsman, came the <I>voyageurs</I> and <I>coureurs</I> and interpreters,
+pack-straps across their foreheads, packets on the bent backs, the long
+birch canoes hoisted to the shoulders of four men, two abreast at each
+end, heads hidden in the inverted keel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The path led between the white fret of Lachine Rapids and the dense
+forests that shrouded the base of Mount Royal.  Checkerboard squares of
+farm patches had been cleared in the woods.  La Salle's old
+thatch-roofed seigniory lay not far back from the water.  St. Anne's
+was the launching place for fleets of canoes that were to ascend the
+Ottawa.  Here, a last look was taken of splits and seams in the birch
+keels.  With invocations of St. Anne in one breath, and invocations of
+a personage not mentioned in the cur�'s "petee cat-ee-cheesm" in the
+next breath, and imprecations that their "souls might be smashed on the
+end of a picket fence,"&mdash;the <I>voyageur's</I> common oath even to this
+day,&mdash;the boatmen stored goods fore, aft, and athwart till each long
+canoe sank to the gunwale as it was gently pushed out on the water.  A
+last sign of the cross, and the lithe figures leap light as a mountain
+cat to their place in the canoes.  There are four benches of paddlers,
+two abreast, with bowman and steersman, to each canoe.  One can guess
+that the explorer and his sons and his nephew, Sieur de la Jemmeraie,
+who was to be second in command, all unhatted as they heard the long
+last farewell of the bells.  Every eye is fastened on the chief
+bowman's steel-shod pole, held high&mdash;there is silence but for the
+bells&mdash;the bowman's pole is lowered&mdash;as with one stroke out sweep the
+paddles in a poetry of motion.  The chimes die away over the water, the
+chapel spire gleams&mdash;it, too, is gone.  Some one strikes up a plaintive
+ditty,&mdash;the <I>voyageur's</I> song of the lost lady and the faded roses, or
+the dying farewell of Cadieux, the hunter, to his comrades,&mdash;and the
+adventurers are launched for the Western Sea.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-196"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-196.jpg" ALT="Fight at the Foot-hills of the Rockies between Crows and Snakes." BORDER="2" WIDTH="397" HEIGHT="633">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Fight at the Foot-hills of the Rockies between Crows and
+Snakes.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+II
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1731-1736
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Every mile westward was consecrated by heroism.  There was the place
+where Cadieux, the white hunter, went ashore single-handed to hold the
+Iroquois at bay, while his comrades escaped by running the rapids; but
+Cadieux was assailed by a subtler foe than the Iroquois, <I>la folie des
+bois</I>,&mdash;the folly of the woods,&mdash;that sends the hunter wandering in
+endless circles till he dies from hunger; and when his companions
+returned, Cadieux lay in eternal sleep with a death chant scribbled on
+bark across his breast.  There were the Rapids of the Long Sault where
+Dollard and seventeen Frenchmen fought seven hundred Iroquois till
+every white man fell.  Not one of all De la V�rendrye's fifty followers
+but knew that perils as great awaited him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Streaked foam told the voyageurs where they were approaching rapids.
+Alert as a hawk, the bowman stroked for the shore; and his stroke was
+answered by all paddles.  If the water were high enough to carry the
+canoes above rocks, and the rapids were not too violent, several of the
+boatmen leaped out to knees in water, and "tracked" the canoes up
+stream; but this was unusual with loaded craft.  The bowman steadied
+the beached keel.  Each man landed with pack on his back, lighted his
+pipe, and trotted away over portages so dank and slippery that only a
+moccasined foot could gain hold.  On long portages, camp-fires were
+kindled and the kettles slung on the crotched sticks for the evening
+meal.  At night, the voyageurs slept under the overturned canoes, or
+lay on the sand with bare faces to the sky.  Morning mist had not risen
+till all the boats were once more breasting the flood of the Ottawa.
+For a month the canoe prows met the current when a portage lifted the
+fleet out of the Ottawa into a shallow stream flowing toward Lake
+Nipissing, and from Lake Nipissing to Lake Huron.  The change was a
+welcome relief.  The canoes now rode with the current; and when a wind
+sprang up astern, blanket sails were hoisted that let the boatmen lie
+back, paddles athwart.  Going with the stream, the <I>voyageurs</I> would
+"run"&mdash;"<I>sauter les rapides</I>"&mdash;the safest of the cataracts.  Bowman,
+not steersman, was the pilot of such "runs."  A faint, far swish as of
+night wind, little forward leaps and swirls of the current, the blur of
+trees  on  either bank, were signs to the bowman.  He rose in his
+place.  A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream&mdash;the
+rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below&mdash;the
+bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his
+horse to the leap; a sudden splash&mdash;the thing has happened&mdash;the canoe
+has run the rapids or shot the falls.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-199"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-199.jpg" ALT="&quot;Each man landed with pack on his back, and trotted away over portages.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="395" HEIGHT="447">
+<H4>
+[Illustration:  "Each man landed with pack on his back, and trotted
+away over portages."]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Pause was made at Lake Huron for favorable weather; and a rear wind
+would carry the canoes at a bouncing pace clear across to
+Michilimackinac, at the mouth of Lake Michigan.  This was the chief fur
+post of the lakes at that time.  All the boats bound east or west,
+Sioux and Cree and Iroquois and Fox, traders' and priests' and
+outlaws'&mdash;stopped at Michilimackinac.  Vice and brandy and religion
+were the characteristics of the fort.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-200"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-200.jpg" ALT="A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands." BORDER="2" WIDTH="248" HEIGHT="430">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+This was familiar ground to De la V�rendrye.  It was at the lonely fur
+post of Nepigon, north of Michilimackinac, in the midst of a wilderness
+forest, that he had eaten his heart out with baffled ambition from 1728
+to 1730, when he descended to Montreal to lay before M. de Beauharnois,
+the governor, plans for the discovery of the Western Sea.  Born at
+Three Rivers in 1686, where the passion for discovery and Radisson's
+fame were in the very air and traders from the wilderness of the Upper
+Country wintered, young Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la V�rendrye, at
+the ambitious age of fourteen, determined that he would become a
+discoverer.[2]  At eighteen he was fighting in New England, at nineteen
+in Newfoundland, at twenty-three in Europe at the battle of Malplaquet,
+where he was carried off the field with nine wounds.  Eager for more
+distinguished service, he returned to Canada in his twenty-seventh
+year, only to find himself relegated to an obscure trading post in far
+Northern wilds.  Then the boyhood ambitions reawakened.  All France and
+Canada, too, were ringing with projects for the discovery of the
+Western Sea.  Russia was acting.  France knew it.  The great priest
+Charlevoix had been sent to Canada to investigate plans for the
+venture, and had recommended an advance westward through the country of
+the Sioux; but the Sioux[3] swarmed round the little fort at Lake Pepin
+on the Mississippi like angry wasps.  That way, exploration was plainly
+barred.  Nothing came of the attempt except a brisk fur trade and a
+brisker warfare on the part of the Sioux.  At the lonely post of
+Nepigon, vague Indian tales came to De la V�rendrye of "a great river
+flowing west" and "a vast, flat country devoid of timber" with "large
+herds of cattle."  Ochagach, an old Indian, drew maps on birch bark
+showing rivers that emptied into the Western Sea.  De la V�rendrye's
+smouldering ambitions kindled.  He hurried to Michilimackinac.  There
+the traders and Indians told the same story.  Glory seemed suddenly
+within De la V�rendrye's grasp.  Carried away with the passion for
+discovery that ruled his age, he took passage in the canoes bound for
+Quebec.  The Marquis Charles de Beauharnois had become governor.  His
+brother Claude had taken part in the exploration of the Mississippi.
+The governor favored the project of the Western Sea.  Perhaps Russia's
+activity gave edge to the governor's zest; but he promised De la
+V�rendrye the court's patronage and prestige.  This was not money.
+France would not advance the enthusiast one sou, but granted him a
+monopoly of the fur trade in the countries which he might discover.
+The winter of 1731-1732 was spent by De la V�rendrye as the guest of
+the governor at Ch�teau St. Louis, arranging with merchants to furnish
+goods for trade; and on May 19 the agreement was signed.  By a lucky
+coincidence, the same winter that M. de la V�rendrye had come down to
+Quebec, there had arrived from the Mississippi fort, his nephew,
+Christopher Dufrost, Sieur de la Jemmeraie, who had commanded the Sioux
+post and been prisoner among the Indians.  So M. de la V�rendrye chose
+Jemmeraie for lieutenant.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now the explorer was back at Michilimackinac, on the way to the
+accomplishment of the daring ambition of his life.  The trip from
+Montreal had fatigued the <I>voyageurs</I>.  Brandy flowed at the lake post
+freely as at a modern mining camp.  The explorer kept military
+discipline over his men.  They received no pay which could be
+squandered away on liquor.  Discontent grew rife.  Taking Father
+Messaiger, the Jesuit, as chaplain, M. de la V�rendrye ordered his
+grumbling <I>voyageurs</I> to their canoes, and, passing through the Straits
+of the Sault, headed his fleet once more for the Western Sea.  Other
+explorers had preceded him on this part of the route.  The Jesuits had
+coasted the north shore of Lake Superior.  So had Radisson.  In 1688 De
+Noyon of Three Rivers had gone as far west as the Lake of the Woods
+towards what is now Minnesota and Manitoba; and in 1717 De Lanoue had
+built a fur post at Kaministiquia, near what is now Fort William on
+Lake Superior.  The shore was always perilous to the boatman of frail
+craft.  The harbors were fathoms deep, and the waves thrashed by a
+cross wind often proved as dangerous as the high sea.  It took M. de la
+V�rendrye's canoemen a month to coast from the Straits of Mackinaw to
+Kaministiquia, which they reached on the 26th of August, seventy-eight
+days after they had left Montreal.  The same distance is now traversed
+in two days.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Prospects were not encouraging.  The crews were sulky.  Kaministiquia
+was the outermost post in the West.  Within a month, the early Northern
+winter would set in.  One hunter can scramble for his winter's food
+where fifty will certainly starve; and the Indians could not be
+expected back from the chase with supplies of furs and food till
+spring.  The canoemen had received no pay.  Free as woodland denizens,
+they chafed under military command.  Boats were always setting out at
+this season for the homeland hamlets of the St. Lawrence; and perhaps
+other hunters told De la V�rendrye's men that this Western Sea was a
+will-o'-the-wisp that would lead for leagues and leagues over strange
+lands, through hostile tribes, to a lonely death in the wilderness.
+When the explorer ordered his men once more in line to launch for the
+Western Sea, there was outright mutiny.  Soldiers and boatmen refused
+to go on.  The Jesuit Messaiger threatened and expostulated with the
+men.  Jemmeraie, who had been among the Sioux, interceded with the
+<I>voyageurs</I>.  A compromise was effected.  Half the boatmen would go
+ahead with Jemmeraie if M. de la V�rendrye would remain with the other
+half at Lake Superior as a rear guard for retreat and the supply of
+provisions.  So the explorer suffered his first check in the advance to
+the Western Sea.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+III
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1732-1736
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Equipping four canoes, Lieutenant de la Jemmeraie and young Jean
+Ba'tiste de la V�rendrye set out with thirty men from Kaministiquia,
+<I>portaged</I> through dense forests over moss and dank rock past the high
+cataract of the falls, and launched westward to prepare a fort for the
+reception of their leader in spring.  Before winter had closed
+navigation, Fort St. Pierre&mdash;named in honor of the explorer&mdash;had been
+erected on the left bank or Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, and the two
+young men not only succeeded in holding their mutinous followers, but
+drove a thriving trade in furs with the Crees.  Perhaps the furs were
+obtained at too great cost, for ammunition and firearms were the price
+paid, but the same mistake has been made at a later day for a lesser
+object than the discovery of the Western Sea.  The spring of 1732 saw
+the young men back at Lake Superior, going post-haste to
+Michilimackinac to exchange furs for the goods from Montreal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the 8th of June, exactly a year from the day that he had left
+Montreal, M. de la V�rendrye pushed forward with all his people for
+Fort St. Pierre.  Five weeks later he was welcomed inside the
+stockades.  Uniformed soldiers were a wonder to the awe-struck Crees,
+who hung round the gateway with hands over their hushed lips.  Gifts of
+ammunition won the loyalty of the chiefs.  Not to be lacking in
+generosity, the Indians collected fifty of their gaudiest canoes and
+offered to escort the explorer west to the Lake of the Woods.  De la
+V�rendrye could not miss such an offer.  Though his <I>voyageurs</I> were
+fatigued, he set out at once.  He had reached Fort St. Pierre on July
+14.  In August his entire fleet glided over the Lake of the Woods.  The
+threescore canoes manned by the Cree boatmen threaded the shadowy
+defiles and labyrinthine channels of the Lake of the Woods&mdash;or Lake of
+the Isles&mdash;coasting island after island along the south or Minnesota
+shore westward to the opening of the river at the northwest angle.
+This was the border of the Sioux territory.  Before the boatmen opened
+the channel of an unknown river.  Around them were sheltered harbors,
+good hunting, and good fishing.  The Crees favored this region for
+winter camping ground because they could hide their families from the
+Sioux on the sheltered islands of the wooded lake.  Night frosts had
+painted the forests red.  The flacker of wild-fowl overhead, the skim
+of ice forming on the lake, the poignant sting of the north wind&mdash;all
+fore-warned winter's approach.  Jean de la V�rendrye had not come up
+with the supplies from Michilimackinac.  The explorer did not tempt
+mutiny by going farther.  He ordered a halt and began building a fort
+that was to be the centre of operations between Montreal and the
+unfound Western Sea.  The fort was named St. Charles in honor of
+Beauharnois.  It was defended by four rows of thick palisades fifteen
+feet high.  In the middle of the enclosure stood the living quarters,
+log cabins with thatched roofs.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-207"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-207.jpg" ALT="A Group of Cree Indians." BORDER="2" WIDTH="414" HEIGHT="264">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: A Group of Cree Indians.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+By October the Indians had scattered to their hunting-grounds like
+leaves to the wind.  The ice thickened.  By November the islands were
+ice-locked and snow had drifted waist-high through the forests.  The
+<I>voyageurs</I> could still fish through ice holes for food; but where was
+young Jean who was to bring up provisions from Michilimackinac?  The
+commander did not voice his fears; and his men were too deep in the
+wilds for desertion.  One afternoon, a shout sounded from the silent
+woods, and out from the white-edged evergreens stepped a figure on
+snowshoes&mdash;Jean de la V�rendrye, leading his boatmen, with the
+provisions packed on their backs, from a point fifty miles away where
+the ice had caught the canoes.  If the supplies had not come, the
+explorer could neither have advanced nor retreated in spring.  It was a
+risk that De la V�rendrye did not intend to have repeated.  Suspecting
+that his merchant partners were dissatisfied, he sent Jemmeraie down to
+Montreal in 1733 to report and urge the necessity for prompt forwarding
+of all supplies.  With Jemmeraie went the Jesuit Messaiger; but their
+combined explanations failed to satisfy the merchants of Montreal.  De
+la V�rendrye had now been away three years.  True, he had constructed
+two fur posts and sent East two cargoes of furs.  His partners were
+looking for enormous wealth.  Disappointed and caring nothing for the
+Western Sea; perhaps, too, secretly accusing De la V�rendrye of making
+profits privately, as many a gentleman of fortune did,&mdash;the merchants
+decided to advance provisions only in proportion to earnings.  What
+would become of the fifty men in the Northern wilderness the partners
+neither asked nor cared.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Young Jean had meanwhile pushed on and built Fort Maurepas on Lake
+Winnipeg; but his father dared not leave Fort St. Charles without
+supplies.  De la V�rendrye's position was now desperate.  He was
+hopelessly in debt to his men for wages.  That did not help discipline.
+His partners were not only withholding supplies, but charging up a high
+rate of interest on the first equipment.  To turn back meant ruin.  To
+go forward he was powerless.  Leaving Jemmeraie in command, and
+permitting his eager son to go ahead with a few picked men to Fort
+Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, De la V�rendrye took a small canoe and
+descended with all swiftness to Quebec.  The winter of 1634-1635 was
+spent with the governor; and the partners were convinced that they must
+either go on with the venture or lose all.  They consented to continue
+supplying goods, but also charging all outlay against the explorer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Father Aulneau went back with De la V�rendrye as chaplain.  The trip
+was made at terrible speed, in the hottest season, through stifling
+forest fires.  Behind, at slower pace, came the provisions.  De la
+V�rendrye reached the Lake of the Woods in September.  Fearing the
+delay of the goods for trade, and dreading the danger of famine with so
+many men in one place, De la V�rendrye despatched Jemmeraie to winter
+with part of the forces at Lake Winnipeg, where Jean and Pierre, the
+second son, had built Fort Maurepas.  The worst fears were realized.
+Ice had blocked the Northern rivers by the time the supplies had come
+to Lake Superior.  Fishing failed.  The hunt was poor.  During the
+winter of 1736 food became scantier at the little forts of St. Pierre,
+St. Charles, and Maurepas.  Rations were reduced from three times to
+once and twice a day.  By spring De la V�rendrye was put to all the
+extremities of famine-stricken traders, his men subsisting on
+parchment, moccasin leather, roots, and their hunting dogs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was compelled to wait at St. Charles for the delayed supplies.
+While he waited came blow upon blow: Jean and Pierre arrived from Fort
+Maurepas with news that Jemmeraie had died three weeks before on his
+way down to aid De la V�rendrye.  Wrapped in a hunter's robe, his body
+was buried in the sand-bank of a little Northern stream, La Fourche des
+Roseaux.  Over the lonely grave the two brothers had erected a cross.
+Father and sons took stock of supplies.  They had not enough powder to
+last another month, and already the Indians were coming in with furs
+and food to be traded for ammunition.  If the Crees had known the
+weakness of the white men, short work might have been made of Fort St.
+Charles.  It never entered the minds of De la V�rendrye and his sons to
+give up.  They decided to rush three canoes of twenty <I>voyageurs</I> to
+Michilimackinac for food and powder.  Father Aulneau, the young priest,
+accompanied the boatmen to attend a religious retreat at
+Michilimackinac.  It had been a hard year for the youthful missionary.
+The ship that brought him from France had been plague-stricken.  The
+trip to Fort St. Charles had been arduous and swift, through stifling
+heat; and the year passed in the North was one of famine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Accompanied by the priest and led by Jean de la V�rendrye, now in his
+twenty-third year, the <I>voyageurs</I> embarked hurriedly on the 8th of
+June, 1736, five years to a day from the time that they left
+Montreal&mdash;and a fateful day it was&mdash;in the search for the Western Sea.
+The Crees had always been friendly; and when the boatmen landed on a
+sheltered island twenty miles from Fort St. Charles to camp for the
+night, no sentry was stationed.  The lake lay calm as glass in the hot
+June night, the camp-fire casting long lines across the water that
+could be seen for miles.  An early start was to be made in the morning
+and a furious pace to be kept all the way to Lake Superior, and the
+<I>voyageurs</I> were presently sound asleep on the sand.  The keenest ears
+could scarcely have distinguished the soft lapping of muffled paddles;
+and no one heard the moccasined tread of ambushed Indians
+reconnoitring.  Seventeen Sioux stepped from their canoes, stole from
+cover to cover, and looked out on the unsuspecting sleepers.  Then the
+Indians as noiselessly slipped back to their canoes to carry word of
+the discovery to a band of marauders.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-212"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-212.jpg" ALT="&quot;The soldiers marched out from Mount Royal.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="401" HEIGHT="607">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: "The soldiers marched out from Mount Royal."]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Something had occurred at Fort St. Charles without M. de la V�rendrye's
+knowledge.  Hilarious with their new possessions of firearms, and
+perhaps, also, mad with the brandy of which Father Aulneau had
+complained, a few mischievous Crees had fired from the fort on
+wandering Sioux of the prairie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who&mdash;fire&mdash;on&mdash;us?" demanded the outraged Sioux.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The French," laughed the Crees.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Sioux at once went back to a band of one hundred and thirty
+warriors.  "Tigers of the plains" the Sioux were called, and now the
+tigers' blood was up.  They set out to slay the first white man seen.
+By chance, he was one Bourassa, coasting by himself.  Taking him
+captive, they had tied him to burn him, when a slave squaw rushed out,
+crying: "What would you do?  This Frenchman is a friend of the Sioux!
+He saved my life!  If you desire to be avenged, go farther on!  You
+will find a camp of Frenchmen, among whom is the son of the white
+chief!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The <I>voyageur</I> was at once unbound, and scouts scattered to find the
+white men.  Night had passed before the scouts had carried news of Jean
+de la V�rendrye's men to the marauding warriors.  The ghostly gray of
+dawn saw the <I>voyageurs</I> paddling swiftly through the morning mist from
+island to island of the Lake of the Woods.  Cleaving the mist behind,
+following solely by the double foam wreaths rippling from the canoe
+prows, came the silent boats of the Sioux.  When sunrise lifted the
+fog, the pursuers paused like stealthy cats.  At sunrise Jean de la
+V�rendrye landed his crews for breakfast.  Camp-fires told the Indians
+where to follow.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+A few days later bands of Sautaux came to the camping ground of the
+French.  The heads of the white men lay on a beaver skin.  All had been
+scalped.  The missionary, Aulneau, was on his knees, as if in morning
+prayers.  An arrow projected from his head.  His left hand was on the
+earth, fallen forward, his right hand uplifted, invoking Divine aid.
+Young V�rendrye lay face down, his back hacked to pieces, a spear sunk
+in his waist, the headless body mockingly decorated with porcupine
+quills.  So died one of the bravest of the young nobility in New France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Sautaux erected a cairn of stones over the bodies of the dead.  All
+that was known of the massacre was vague Indian gossip.  The Sioux
+reported that they had not intended to murder the priest, but a
+crazy-brained fanatic had shot the fatal arrow and broken from
+restraint, weapon in hand.  Rain-storms had washed out all marks of the
+fray.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In September the bodies of the victims were carried to Fort St.
+Charles, and interred in the chapel.  Eight hundred Crees besought M.
+de la V�rendrye to let them avenge the murder; but the veteran of
+Malplaquet exhorted them not to war.  Meanwhile, Fort St. Charles
+awaited the coming of supplies from Lake Superior.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1736-1740
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+A week passed, and on the 17th of June the canoe loads of ammunition
+and supplies for which the murdered <I>voyageurs</I> had been sent arrived
+at Fort St. Charles.  In June the Indian hunters came in with the
+winter's hunt; and on the 20th thirty Sautaux hurried to Fort St.
+Charles, to report that they had found the mangled bodies of the
+massacred Frenchmen on an island seven leagues from the fort.  Again La
+V�rendrye had to choose whether to abandon his cherished dreams, or
+follow them at the risk of ruin and death.  As before, when his men had
+mutinied, he determined to advance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Jean, the eldest son, was dead.  Pierre and Fran�ois were with their
+father.  Louis, the youngest, now seventeen years of age, had come up
+with the supplies.  Pierre at once went to Lake Winnipeg, to prepare
+Fort Maurepas for the reception of all the forces.  Winter set in.
+Snow lay twelve feet deep in the forests now known as the Minnesota
+Borderlands.  On February 8, 1737, in the face of a biting north wind,
+with the thermometer at forty degrees below zero, M. de la V�rendrye
+left Fort St. Charles, Fran�ois carrying the French flag, with ten
+soldiers, wearing snow-shoes, in line behind, and two or three hundred
+Crees swathed in furs bringing up a ragged rear.  The bright uniforms
+of the soldiers were patches of red among the snowy everglades.
+Bivouac was made on beds of pine boughs,&mdash;feet to the camp-fire, the
+night frost snapping like a whiplash, the stars flashing with a steely
+clearness known only in northern climes.  The march was at a swift
+pace, for three weeks by canoe is short enough time to traverse the
+Minnesota and Manitoba Borderlands northwest to Lake Winnipeg; and in
+seventeen days M. de la V�rendrye was at Fort Maurepas.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fort Maurepas (in the region of the modern Alexander) lay on a tongue
+of sand extending into the lake a few miles beyond the entrance of Red
+River.  Tamarack and poplar fringe the shore; and in windy weather the
+lake is lashed into a roughness that resembles the flux of ocean tides.
+I remember once going on a steamer towards the site of Maurepas.  The
+ship drew lightest of draft.  While we were anchored the breeze fell,
+and the ship was stranded as if by ebb tide for twenty-four hours.  The
+action of the wind explained the Indian tales of an ocean tide, which
+had misled La V�rendrye into expecting to find the Western Sea at this
+point.  He found a magnificent body of fresh water, but not the ocean.
+The fort was the usual pioneer fur post&mdash;a barracks of unbarked logs,
+chinked up with frozen clay and moss, roofed with branches and snow,
+occupying the centre of a courtyard, palisaded by slabs of pine logs.
+M. de la V�rendrye was now in the true realm of the explorer&mdash;in
+territory where no other white man had trod.  With a shout his motley
+forces emerged from the snowy tamaracks, and with a shout from Pierre
+de la V�rendrye and his tawny followers the explorer was welcomed
+through the gateway of little Fort Maurepas.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-217"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-217.jpg" ALT="Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca River." BORDER="2" WIDTH="403" HEIGHT="303">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca River.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Pierre de la V�rendrye had heard of a region to the south much
+frequented by the Assiniboine Indians, who had conducted Radisson to
+the Sea of the North fifty years before&mdash;the Forks where the
+Assiniboine River joins the Red, and the city of Winnipeg stands
+to-day.  It was reported that game was plentiful here.  Two hundred
+tepees of Assiniboines were awaiting the explorer.  His forces were
+worn with their marching, but in a few weeks the glaze of ice above the
+fathomless drifts of snow would be too rotten for travel, and not until
+June would the riverways be clear for canoes.  But such a scant supply
+of goods had his partners sent up that poor De la V�rendrye had nothing
+to trade with the waiting Assiniboines.  Sending his sons forward to
+reconnoitre the Forks of the Assiniboine,&mdash;the modern Winnipeg,&mdash;he set
+out for Montreal as soon as navigation opened, taking with him fourteen
+great canoes of precious furs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fourteen canoe loads proved his salvation.  As long as there were
+furs and prospects of furs, his partners would back the enterprise of
+finding the Western Sea.  The winter of 1738 was spent as the guest of
+the governor at Ch�teau St. Louis.  The partners were satisfied, and
+plucked up hope of their venture.  They would advance provisions in
+proportion to earnings.  By September he was back at Fort Maurepas on
+Lake Winnipeg, pushing for the undiscovered bourne of the Western Sea.
+Leaving orders for trade with the chief clerk at Maurepas, De la
+V�rendrye picked out his most intrepid men; and in September of 1738,
+for the first time in history, white men glided up the ochre-colored,
+muddy current of the Red for the Forks of the Assiniboine.  Ten Cree
+wigwams and two war chiefs awaited De la V�rendrye on the low flats of
+what are now known as South Winnipeg.  Not the fabled Western Sea, but
+an illimitable ocean of rolling prairie&mdash;the long russet grass rising
+and falling to the wind like waves to the run of invisible
+feet&mdash;stretched out before the eager eyes of the explorer.  Northward
+lay the autumn-tinged brushwood of Red River.  South, shimmering in the
+purple mists of Indian summer, was Red River Valley.  Westward the sun
+hung like a red shield, close to the horizon, over vast reaches of
+prairie billowing to the sky-line in the tide of a boundless ocean.
+Such was the discovery of the Canadian Northwest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Doubtless the weary gaze of the tired <I>voyageurs</I> turned longingly
+westward.  Where was the Western Sea?  Did it lie just beyond the
+horizon where skyline and prairie met, or did the trail of their quest
+run on&mdash;on&mdash;on&mdash;endlessly?  The Assiniboine flows into the Red, the Red
+into Lake Winnipeg, the Lake into Hudson Bay.  Plainly, Assiniboine
+Valley was not the way to the Western Sea.  But what lay just beyond
+this Assiniboine Valley?  An old Cree chief warned the boatmen that the
+Assiniboine River was very low and would wreck the canoes; but he also
+told vague yarns of "great waters beyond the mountains of the setting
+sun," where white men dwelt, and the waves came in a tide, and the
+waters were salt.  The Western Sea where the Spaniards dwelt had long
+been known.  It was a Western Sea to the north, that would connect
+Louisiana and Canada, that De la V�rendrye sought.  The Indian fables,
+without doubt, referred to a sea beyond the Assiniboine River, and
+thither would De la V�rendrye go at any cost.  Some sort of barracks or
+shelter was knocked up on the south side of the Assiniboine opposite
+the flats.  It was subsequently known as Fort Rouge, after the color of
+the adjacent river, and was the foundation of Winnipeg.  Leaving men to
+trade at Fort Rouge, De la V�rendrye set out on September 26, 1738, for
+the height of land that must lie beyond the sources of the Assiniboine.
+De la V�rendrye was now like a man hounded by his own Frankenstein.  A
+thousand leagues&mdash;every one marked by disaster and failure and sinking
+hopes&mdash;lay behind him.  A thousand leagues of wilderness lay before
+him.  He had only a handful of men.  The Assiniboine Indians were of
+dubious friendliness.  The white men were scarce of food.  In a few
+weeks they would be exposed to the terrible rigors of Northern winter.
+Yet they set their faces toward the west, types of the pioneers who
+have carved empire out of wilderness.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-220"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-220.jpg" ALT="The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains." BORDER="2" WIDTH="397" HEIGHT="404">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The Assiniboine was winding and low, with many sand bars.  On the
+wooded banks deer and buffalo grazed in such countless multitudes that
+the boatmen took them for great herds of cattle.  Flocks of wild geese
+darkened the sky overhead.  As the boats wound up the shallows of the
+river, ducks rose in myriad flocks.  Prairie wolves skulked away from
+the river bank, and the sand-hill cranes were so unused to human
+presence that they scarcely rose as the voyageurs poled past.  While
+the boatmen poled, the soldiers marched in military order across
+country, so avoiding the bends of the river.  Daily, Crees and
+Assiniboines of the plains joined the white men.  A week after leaving
+the Forks or Fort Rouge, De la V�rendrye came to the Portage of the
+Prairie, leading north to Lake Manitoba and from the lake to Hudson
+Bay.  Clearly, northward was not the way to the Western Sea; but the
+Assiniboines told of a people to the southwest&mdash;the Mandans&mdash;who knew a
+people who lived on the Western Sea.  As soon as his baggage came up,
+De la V�rendrye ordered the construction of a fort&mdash;called De la
+Reine&mdash;on the banks of the Assiniboine.  This was to be the forwarding
+post for the Western Sea.  To the Mandans living on the Missouri, who
+knew a people living on salt water, De la V�rendrye now directed his
+course.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-223"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-223.jpg" ALT="Hungry Hall, 1870; near the site of the V�rendrye Fort in Rainy River Region." BORDER="2" WIDTH="399" HEIGHT="298">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Hungry Hall, 1870; near the site of the V�rendrye Fort
+in Rainy River Region.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+On the morning of October 18 drums beat to arms.  Additional men had
+come up from the other forts.  Fifty-two soldiers and <I>voyageurs</I> now
+stood in line.  Arms were inspected.  To each man were given powder,
+balls, axe, and kettle.  Pierre and Fran�ois de la V�rendrye hoisted
+the French flag.  For the first time a bugle call sounded over the
+prairie.  At the word, out stepped the little band of white men,
+marking time for the Western Sea.  The course lay west-southwest, up
+the Souris River, through wooded ravines now stripped of foliage, past
+alkali sloughs ice-edged by frost, over rolling cliffs russet and bare,
+where gopher and badger and owl and roving buffalo were the only signs
+of life.  On the 21st of October two hundred Assiniboine warriors
+joined the marching white men.  In the sheltered ravines buffalo grazed
+by the hundreds of thousands, and the march was delayed by frequent
+buffalo hunts to gather pemmican&mdash;pounded marrow and fat of the
+buffalo&mdash;which was much esteemed by the Mandans.  Within a month so
+many Assiniboines had joined the French that the company numbered more
+than six hundred warriors, who were ample protection against the Sioux;
+and the Sioux were the deadly terror of all tribes of the plains.  But
+M.  de la V�rendrye was expected to present ammunition to his
+Assiniboine friends.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Four outrunners went speeding to the Missouri to notify the Mandans of
+the advancing warriors.  The <I>coureurs</I> carried presents of pemmican.
+To prevent surprise, the Assiniboines marched under the sheltered
+slopes of the hills and observed military order.  In front rode the
+warriors, dressed in garnished buckskin and armed with spears and
+arrows.  Behind, on foot, came the old and the lame.  To the rear was
+another guard of warriors.  Lagging in ragged lines far back came a
+ragamuffin brigade, the women, children, and dogs&mdash;squaws astride
+cayuses lean as barrel hoops, children in moss bags on their mothers'
+backs, and horses and dogs alike harnessed with the <I>travaille</I>&mdash;two
+sticks tied into a triangle, with the shafts fastened to a cinch on
+horse or dog.  The joined end of the shafts dragged on the ground, and
+between them hung the baggage, surmounted by papoose, or pet owl, or
+the half-tamed pup of a prairie-wolf, or even a wild-eyed young squaw
+with hair flying to the wind.  At night camp was made in a circle
+formed of the hobbled horses.  Outside, the dogs scoured in pursuit of
+coyotes.  The women and children took refuge in the centre, and the
+warriors slept near their picketed horses.  By the middle of November
+the motley cavalcade had crossed the height of land between the
+Assiniboine River and the Missouri, and was heading for the Mandan
+villages.  Mandan <I>coureurs</I> came out to welcome the visitors,
+pompously presenting De la V�rendrye with corn in the ear and tobacco.
+At this stage, the explorer discovered that his bag of presents for his
+hosts had been stolen by the Assiniboines; but he presented the Mandans
+with what ammunition he could spare, and gave them plenty of pemmican
+which his hunters had cured.  The two tribes drove a brisk trade in
+furs, which the northern Indians offered, and painted plumes, which the
+Mandans displayed to the envy of Assiniboine warriors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the 3d of December, De la V�rendrye's sons stepped before the ragged
+host of six hundred savages with the French flag hoisted.  The explorer
+himself was lifted to the shoulders of the Mandan <I>coureurs</I>.  A gun
+was fired and the strange procession set out for the Mandan villages.
+In this fashion white men first took possession of the Upper Missouri.
+Some miles from the lodges a band of old chiefs met De la V�rendrye and
+gravely handed him a grand calumet of pipestone ornamented with eagle
+feathers.  This typified peace.  De la V�rendrye ordered his fifty
+French followers to draw up in line.  The sons placed the French flag
+four paces to the fore.  The Assiniboine warriors took possession in
+stately Indian silence to the right and left of the whites.  At a
+signal three thundering volleys of musketry were fired.  The Mandans
+fell back, prostrated with fear and wonder.  The command "forward" was
+given, and the Mandan village was entered in state at four in the
+afternoon of December 3, 1738.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The village was in much the same condition as a hundred years later
+when visited by Prince Maximilian and by the artist Catlin.  It
+consisted of circular huts, with thatched roofs, on which perched the
+gaping women and children.  Around the village of huts ran a moat or
+ditch, which was guarded in time of war with the Sioux.  Flags flew
+from the centre poles of each hut; but the flags were the scalps of
+enemies slain.  In the centre of the village was a larger hut.  This
+was the "medicine lodge," or council hall, of the chiefs, used only for
+ceremonies of religion and war and treaties of peace.  Thither De la
+V�rendrye was conducted.  Here the Mandan chiefs sat on buffalo robes
+in a circle round the fire, smoking the calumet, which was handed to
+the white man.  The explorer then told the Indians of his search for
+the Western Sea.  Of a Western Sea they could tell him nothing
+definite.  They knew a people far west who grew corn and tobacco and
+who lived on the shores of water that was bitter for drinking.  The
+people were white.  They dressed in armor and lived in houses of stone.
+Their country was full of mountains.  More of the Western Sea, De la
+V�rendrye could not learn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, six hundred Assiniboine visitors were a tax on the
+hospitality of the Mandans, who at once spread a rumor of a Sioux raid.
+This gave speed to the Assiniboines' departure.  Among the Assiniboines
+who ran off in precipitate fright was De la V�rendrye's interpreter.
+It was useless to wait longer.  The French were short of provisions,
+and the Missouri Indians could not be expected to support fifty white
+men.  Though it was the bitter cold of midwinter, De la V�rendrye
+departed for Fort de la Reine.  Two Frenchmen were left to learn the
+Missouri dialects.  A French flag in a leaden box with the arms of
+France inscribed was presented to the Mandan chief; and De la V�rendrye
+marched from the village on the 8th of December.  Scarcely had he left,
+when he fell terribly ill; but for the pathfinder of the wilderness
+there is neither halt nor retreat.  M. de la V�rendrye's ragged army
+tramped wearily on, half blinded by snow glare and buffeted by prairie
+blizzards, huddling in snowdrifts from the wind at night and uncertain
+of their compass over the white wastes by day.  There is nothing so
+deadly silent and utterly destitute of life as the prairie in
+midwinter.  Moose and buffalo had sought the shelter of wooded ravines.
+Here a fox track ran over the snow.  There a coyote skulked from cover,
+to lope away the next instant for brushwood or hollow, and
+snow-buntings or whiskey-jacks might have followed the marchers for
+pickings of waste; but east, west, north, and south was nothing but the
+wide, white wastes of drifted snow.  On Christmas Eve of 1738 low
+curling smoke above the prairie told the wanderers that they were
+nearing the Indian camps of the Assiniboines; and by nightfall of
+February 10, 1739, they were under the shelter of Fort de la Reine.  "I
+have never been so wretched from illness and fatigue in all my life as
+on that journey," reported De la V�rendrye.  As usual, provisions were
+scarce at the fort.  Fifty people had to be fed.  Buffalo and deer meat
+saved the French from starvation till spring.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-228"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-228.jpg" ALT="A Monarch of the Plains." BORDER="2" WIDTH="194" HEIGHT="280">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: A Monarch of the Plains.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+All that De la V�rendrye had accomplished on this trip was to learn
+that salt water existed west-southwest.  Anxious to know more of the
+Northwest, he sent his sons to the banks of a great northern river.
+This was the Saskatchewan.  In their search of the Northwest, they
+constructed two more trading posts, Fort Dauphin near Lake Manitoba,
+and Bourbon on the Saskatchewan.  Winter quarters were built at the
+forks of the river, which afterwards became the site of Fort Poskoyac.
+This spring not a canoe load of food came up from Montreal.  Papers had
+been served for the seizure of all De la V�rendrye's forts, goods,
+property, and chattels to meet the claims of his creditors.  Desperate,
+but not deterred from his quest, De la V�rendrye set out to contest the
+lawsuits in Montreal.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+V
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1740-1750
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Which way to turn now for the Western Sea that eluded their quest like
+a will-o'-the-wisp was the question confronting Pierre, Fran�ois, and
+Louis de la V�rendrye during the explorer's absence in Montreal.  They
+had followed the great Saskatchewan westward to its forks.  No river
+was found in this region flowing in the direction of the Western Sea.
+They had been in the country of the Missouri; but neither did any river
+there flow to a Western Sea.  Yet the Mandans told of salt water far to
+the west.  Thither they would turn the baffling search.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The two men left among the Mandans to learn the language had returned
+to the Assiniboine River with more news of tribes from "the setting
+sun" who dwelt on salt water.  Pierre de la V�rendrye went down to the
+Missouri with the two interpreters; but the Mandans refused to supply
+guides that year, and the young Frenchman came back to winter on the
+Assiniboine.  Here he made every preparation for another attempt to
+find the Western Sea by way of the Missouri.  On April 29, 1742, the
+two brothers, Pierre and Fran�ois, left the Assiniboine with the two
+interpreters.  Their course led along the trail that for two hundred
+years was to be a famous highway between the Missouri and Hudson Bay.
+Heading southwest, they followed the Souris River to the watershed of
+the Missouri, and in three weeks were once more the guests of the smoky
+Mandan lodges.  Round the inside walls of each circular hut ran berth
+beds of buffalo skin with trophies of the chase,&mdash;hide-shields and
+weapons of war, fastened to the posts that separated berth from berth.
+A common fire, with a family meat pot hanging above, occupied the
+centre of the lodge.  In one of these lodges the two brothers and their
+men were quartered.  The summer passed feasting with the Mandans and
+smoking the calumet of peace; but all was in vain.  The Missouri
+Indians were arrant cowards in the matter of war.  The terror of their
+existence was the Sioux.  The Mandans would not venture through Sioux
+territory to accompany the brothers in the search for the Western Sea.
+At last two guides were obtained, who promised to conduct the French to
+a neighboring tribe that might know of the Western Sea.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-231"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-231.jpg" ALT="Fur Traders' Boats towed down the Saskatchewan in the Summer of 1900." BORDER="2" WIDTH="391" HEIGHT="262">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Fur Traders' Boats towed down the Saskatchewan in the
+Summer of 1900.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The party set out on horseback, travelling swiftly southwest and along
+the valley of the Little Missouri toward the Black Hills.  Here their
+course turned sharply west toward the Powder River country, past the
+southern bounds of the Yellowstone.  For three weeks they saw no sign
+of human existence.  Deer and antelope bounded over the parched alkali
+uplands.  Prairie dogs perched on top of their earth mounds, to watch
+the lonely riders pass; and all night the far howl of grayish forms on
+the offing of the starlit prairie told of prowling coyotes.  On the
+11th of August the brothers camped on the Powder Hills.  Mounting to
+the crest of a cliff, they scanned far and wide for signs of the
+Indians whom the Mandans knew.  The valleys were desolate.  Kindling a
+signal-fire to attract any tribes that might be roaming, they built a
+hut and waited.  A month passed.  There was no answering signal.  One
+of the Mandan guides took himself off in fright.  On the fifth week a
+thin line of smoke rose against the distant sky.  The remaining Mandans
+went to reconnoitre and found a camp of Beaux Hommes, or Crows, who
+received the French well.  Obtaining fresh guides from the Crows and
+dismissing the Mandans, the brothers again headed westward.  The Crows
+guided them to the Horse Indians, who in turn took the French to their
+next western neighbors, the Bows.  The Bows were preparing to war on
+the Snakes, a mountain tribe to the west.  Tepees dotted the valley.
+Women were pounding the buffalo meat into pemmican for the raiders.
+The young braves spent the night with war-song and war-dance, to work
+themselves into a frenzy of bravado.  The Bows were to march west; so
+the French joined the warriors, gradually turning northwest toward what
+is now Helena.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was winter.  The hills were powdered with snow that obliterated all
+traces of the fleeing Snakes.  The way became more mountainous and
+dangerous.  Iced sloughs gave place to swift torrents and cataracts.
+On New Year's day, 1743, there rose through the gray haze to the fore
+the ragged sky-line of the Bighorn Mountains.  Women and children were
+now left in a sheltered valley, the warriors advancing unimpeded.
+Fran�ois de la V�rendrye remained at the camp to guard the baggage.
+Pierre went on with the raiders.  In two weeks they were at the foot of
+the main range of the northern Rockies.  Against the sky the snowy
+heights rose&mdash;an impassable barrier between the plains and the Western
+Sea.  What lay beyond&mdash;the Beyond that had been luring them on and on,
+from river to river and land to land, for more than ten years?  Surely
+on the other side of those lofty summits one might look down on the
+long-sought Western Sea.  Never suspecting that another thousand miles
+of wilderness and mountain fastness lay between him and his quest,
+young De la V�rendrye wanted to cross the Great Divide.  Destiny
+decreed otherwise.  The raid of the Bows against the Snakes ended in a
+fiasco.  No Snakes were to be found at their usual winter hunt.  Had
+they decamped to massacre the Bow women and children left in the valley
+to the rear?  The Bows fled back to their wives in a panic; so De la
+V�rendrye could not climb the mountains that barred the way to the sea.
+The retreat was made in the teeth of a howling mountain blizzard, and
+the warriors reached the rendezvous more dead than alive.  No Snake
+Indians were seen at all.  The Bows marched homeward along the valley
+of the Upper Missouri through the country of the Sioux, with whom they
+were allied.  On the banks of the river the brothers buried a leaden
+plate with the royal arms of France imprinted.  At the end of July,
+1743, they were once more back on the Assiniboine River.  For thirteen
+years they had followed a hopeless quest.  Instead of a Western Sea,
+they had found a sea of prairie, a sea of mountains, and two great
+rivers, the Saskatchewan and the Missouri.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+VI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1743-1750
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+But the explorer, who had done so much to extend French domain in the
+West, was a ruined man.  To the accusations of his creditors were added
+the jealous calumnies of fur traders eager to exploit the new country.
+The eldest son, with tireless energy, had gone up the Saskatchewan to
+Fort Poskoyac when he was recalled to take a position in the army at
+Montreal.  In 1746 De la V�rendrye himself was summoned to Quebec and
+his command given to M. de Noyelles.  The game being played by jealous
+rivals was plain.  De la V�rendrye was to be kept out of the West while
+tools of the Quebec traders spied out the fur trade of the Assiniboine
+and the Missouri.  Immediately on receiving freedom from military duty,
+young Chevalier de la V�rendrye set out for Manitoba.  On the way he
+met his father's successor, M. de Noyelles, coming home crestfallen.
+The supplanter had failed to control the Indians.  In one year half the
+forts of the chain leading to the Western Sea had been destroyed.
+These Chevalier de la V�rendrye restored as he passed westward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Governor Beauharnois had always refused to believe the charges of
+private peculation against M. de la V�rendrye.  Governor de la
+Galissonni�re was equally favorable to the explorer; and De la
+V�rendrye was decorated with the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, and
+given permission to continue his explorations.  The winter of 1749 was
+passed preparing supplies for the posts of the West; but a life of
+hardship and disappointment had undermined the constitution of the
+dauntless pathfinder.  On the 6th of December, while busy with plans
+for his hazardous and thankless quest, he died suddenly at Montreal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rival fur traders scrambled for the spoils of the Manitoba and Missouri
+territory like dogs for a bone.  De la Jonqui�re had become governor.
+Allied with him was the infamous Bigot, the intendant, and those two
+saw in the Western fur trade an opportunity to enrich themselves.  The
+rights of De la V�rendrye's sons to succeed their father were entirely
+disregarded.  Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was appointed commander of the
+Western Sea.  The very goods forwarded by De la V�rendrye were
+confiscated.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-236"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-236.jpg" ALT="&quot;Tepees dotted the valley.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="397" HEIGHT="236">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: "Tepees dotted the valley."]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+But Saint-Pierre had enough trouble from his appointment.  His
+lieutenant, M. de Niverville, almost lost his life among hostiles on
+the way down the Saskatchewan after building Fort Lajonqui�re at the
+foothills of the Rockies, where Calgary now stands.  Saint-Pierre had
+headquarters in Manitoba on the Assiniboine, and one afternoon in
+midwinter, when his men were out hunting, he saw his fort suddenly fill
+with armed Assiniboines bent on massacre.  They jostled him aside,
+broke into the armory, and helped themselves to weapons.  Saint-Pierre
+had only one recourse.  Seizing a firebrand, he tore the cover off a
+keg of powder and threatened to blow the Indians to perdition.  The
+marauders dashed from the fort, and Saint-Pierre shot the bolts of gate
+and sally-port.  When the white hunters returned, they quickly gathered
+their possessions together and abandoned Fort de la Reine.  Four days
+later the fort lay in ashes.  So ended the dream of enthusiasts to find
+a way overland to the Western Sea.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] The authorities for La V�rendrye's life are, of course, his own
+reports as found in the State Papers of the Canadian Archives, Pierre
+Margry's compilation of these reports, and the Rev. Father Jones'
+collection of the <I>Aulneau Letters</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] The <I>Pays d'en Haut</I> or "Up-Country" was the vague name given by
+the fur traders to the region between the Missouri and the North Pole.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] Throughout this volume the word "Sioux" is used as applying to the
+entire confederacy, and not to the Minnesota Sioux only.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART III
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1769-1782
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE LEADS
+SAMUEL HEARNE TO THE ARCTIC CIRCLE AND
+ATHABASCA REGION
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IX
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1769-1782
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SAMUEL HEARNE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The Adventures of Hearne in his Search for the Coppermine River and the
+Northwest Passage&mdash;Hilarious Life of Wassail led by Governor
+Norton&mdash;The Massacre of the Eskimo by Hearne's Indians North of the
+Arctic Circle&mdash;Discovery of the Athabasca Country&mdash;Hearne becomes
+Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but is captured by the
+French&mdash;Frightful Death of Norton and Suicide of Matonabbee
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+For a hundred years after receiving its charter to exploit the furs of
+the North, the Hudson's Bay Company slumbered on the edge of a frozen
+sea.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Its fur posts were scattered round the desolate shores of the Northern
+bay like beads on a string; but the languid Company never attempted to
+penetrate the unknown lands beyond the coast.  It was unnecessary.  The
+Indians came to the Company.  The company did not need to go to the
+Indians.  Just as surely as spring cleared the rivers of ice and set
+the unlocked torrents rushing to the sea, there floated down-stream
+Indian dugout and birch canoe, loaded with wealth of peltries for the
+fur posts of the English Company.  So the English sat snugly secure
+inside their stockades, lords of the wilderness, and drove a thriving
+trade with folded hands.  For a penny knife, they bought a beaver skin;
+and the skin sold in Europe for two or three shillings.  The trade of
+the old Company was not brisk; but it paid.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-242"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-242.jpg" ALT="An Eskimo Belle.  Note the apron of ermine and sable]" BORDER="2" WIDTH="153" HEIGHT="387">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: An Eskimo Belle.  Note the apron of ermine and sable].
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+It was the prod of keen French traders that stirred the slumbering
+giant.  In his search for the Western Sea, De la V�rendrye had pushed
+west by way of the Great Lakes to the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains
+and the Saskatchewan.  Henceforth, not so many furs came down-stream to
+the English Company on the bay.  De la V�rendrye had been followed by
+hosts of free-lances&mdash;<I>coureurs</I> and <I>voyageurs</I>&mdash;who spread through
+the wilderness from the Missouri to the Athabasca, intercepting the
+fleets of furs that formerly went to Hudson Bay.  The English Company
+rubbed its eyes; and rivals at home began to ask what had been done in
+return for the charter.  France had never ceased seeking the mythical
+Western Sea that was supposed to lie just beyond the Mississippi; and
+when French buccaneers destroyed the English Company's forts on the
+bay, the English ambassador at Paris exacted such an enormous bill of
+damages that the Hudson Bay traders were enabled to build a stronger
+fortress up at Prince of Wales on the mouth of Churchill River than the
+French themselves possessed at Quebec on the St. Lawrence.  What&mdash;asked
+the rivals of the Company in London&mdash;had been done in return for such
+national protection?  France had discovered and explored a whole new
+world north of the Missouri.  What had the English done?  Where did the
+Western Sea of which Spain had possession in the South lie towards the
+North?  What lay between the Hudson Bay and that Western Sea?  Was
+there a Northwest passage by water through this region to Asia?  If
+not, was there an undiscovered world in the North, like Louisiana in
+the South?  There was talk of revoking the charter.  Then the Company
+awakened from its long sleep with a mighty stir.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The annual boats that came out to Hudson Bay in the summer of 1769
+anchored on the offing, six miles from the gray walls of Fort Prince of
+Wales, and roared out a salute of cannon becoming the importance of
+ships that bore almost revolutionary commissions.  The fort cannon on
+the walls of Churchill River thundered their answer.  A pinnace came
+scudding over the waves from the ships.  A gig boat launched out from
+the fort to welcome the messengers.  Where the two met halfway, packets
+of letters were handed to Moses Norton, governor at Fort Prince of
+Wales, commanding him to despatch his most intrepid explorers for the
+discovery of unknown rivers, strange lands, rumored copper mines, and
+the mythical Northwest Passage that was supposed to lead directly to
+China.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fort lay on a spit of sand running out into the bay at the mouth of
+Churchill River.  It was three hundred yards long by three hundred
+yards wide, with four bastions, in three of which were stores and wells
+of water.  The fourth bastion contained the powder-magazine.  The walls
+were thirty feet wide at the bottom and twenty feet wide at the top, of
+hammer-dressed stone, mounted with forty great cannon.  A commodious
+stone house, furnished with all the luxuries of the chase, stood in the
+centre of the courtyard.  This was the residence of the governor.
+Offices, warehouses, barracks, and hunters' lodges were banked round
+the inner walls of the fort.  The garrison consisted of thirty-nine
+common soldiers and a few officers.  In addition, there hung about the
+fort the usual habitu�s of a Northern fur post,&mdash;young clerks from
+England, who had come out for a year's experience in the wilds;
+underpaid artisans, striving to mend their fortunes by illicit trade;
+hunters and <I>coureurs</I> and <I>voyageurs</I>, living like Indians but with a
+strain of white blood that forever distinguished them from their
+comrades; stately Indian sachems, stalking about the fort with whiffs
+of contempt from their long calumets for all this white-man luxury; and
+a ragamuffin brigade,&mdash;squaws, youngsters, and beggars,&mdash;who subsisted
+by picking up food from the waste heap of the fort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The commission to despatch explorers to the inland country proved the
+sensation of a century at the fort.  Round the long mess-room table
+gathered officers and traders, intent on the birch-bark maps drawn by
+old Indian chiefs of an unknown interior, where a "Far-Off-Metal River"
+flowed down to the Northwest Passage.  Huge log fires blazed on the
+stone hearths at each end of the mess room.  Smoky lanterns and pine
+fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light
+from rafters that girded ceiling and walls.  On the floor of flagstones
+lay enormous skins of the chase&mdash;polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly.
+Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders.
+Draped across the walls were Company flags&mdash;an English ensign with the
+letters "H. B. C." painted in white on a red background, or in red on a
+white background.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the head of the table sat one of the most remarkable scoundrels
+known in the annals of the Company, Moses Norton, governor of Fort
+Prince of Wales, a full-blooded Indian, who had been sent to England
+for nine years to be educated and had returned to the fort to resume
+all the vices and none of the virtues of white man and red.
+Clean-skinned, copper-colored, lithe and wiry as a tiger cat, with the
+long, lank, oily black hair of his race, Norton bore himself with all
+the airs of a European princelet and dressed himself in the beaded
+buckskins of a savage.  Before him the Indians cringed as before one of
+their demon gods, and on the same principle.  Bad gods could do the
+Indians harm.  Good gods wouldn't.  Therefore, the Indians propitiated
+the bad gods; and of all Indian demons Norton was the worst.  The black
+arts of mediaeval poisoning were known to him, and he never scrupled to
+use them against an enemy.  The Indians thought him possessed of the
+power of the evil eye; but his power was that of arsenic or laudanum
+dropped in the food of an unsuspecting enemy.  Two of his wives, with
+all of whom he was inordinately jealous, had died of poison.  Against
+white men who might offend him he used more open means,&mdash;the triangle,
+the whipping post, the branding iron.  Needless to say that a man who
+wielded such power swelled the Company's profits and stood high in
+favor with the directors.  At his right hand lay an enormous bunch of
+keys.  These he carried with him by day and kept under his pillow by
+night.  They were the keys to the apartments of his many wives, for
+like all Indians Norton believed in a plurality of wives, and the life
+of no Indian was safe who refused to contribute a daughter to the
+harem.  The two master passions of the governor were jealousy and
+tyranny; and while he lived like a Turkish despot himself, he ruled his
+fort with a rod of iron and left the brand of his wrath on the person
+of soldier or officer who offered indignity to the Indian race.  It was
+a common thing for Norton to poison an Indian who refused to permit a
+daughter to join the collection of wives; then to flog the back off a
+soldier who casually spoke to one of the wives in the courtyard; and in
+the evening spend the entire supper hour preaching sermons on virtue to
+his men.  By a curious freak, Marie, his daughter, now a child of nine,
+inherited from her father the gentle qualities of the English life in
+which he had passed his youth.  She shunned the native women and was
+often to be seen hanging on her father's arm, as officers and governor
+smoked their pipes over the mess-room table.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Near Norton sat another famous Indian, Matonabbee, the son of a slave
+woman at the fort, who had grown up to become a great ambassador to the
+native tribes for the English traders.  Measuring more than six feet,
+straight as a lance, supple as a wrestler, thin, wiry, alert, restless
+with the instinct of the wild creatures, Matonabbee was now in the
+prime of his manhood, chief of the Chipewyans at the fort, and master
+of life and death to all in his tribe.  It was Matonabbee whom the
+English traders sent up the Saskatchewan to invite the tribes of the
+Athabasca down to the bay.  The Athabascans listened to the message of
+peace with a treacherous smile.  At midnight assassins stole to his
+tent, overpowered his slave, and dragged the captive out.  Leaping to
+his feet, Matonabbee shouted defiance, hurled his assailants aside like
+so many straws, pursued the raiders to their tents, single-handed
+released his slave, and marched out unscathed.  That was the way
+Matonabbee had won the Athabascans for the Hudson's Bay Company.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Officers of the garrison, bluff sea-captains, spinning yarns of iceberg
+and floe, soldiers and traders, made up the rest of the company.  Among
+the white men was one eager face,&mdash;that of Samuel Hearne, who was to
+explore the interior and now scanned the birch-bark drawings to learn
+the way to the "Far-off-Metal River."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-248"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-248.jpg" ALT="Samuel Hearne." BORDER="2" WIDTH="379" HEIGHT="481">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Samuel Hearne.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+By November 6 all was in readiness for the departure of the explorer.
+Two Indian guides, who knew the way to the North, were assigned to
+Hearne; two European servants went with him to look after the
+provisions; and two Indian hunters joined the company.  In the gray
+mist of Northern dawn, with the stars still pricking through the frosty
+air, seven salutes of cannon awakened the echoes of the frozen sea.
+The gates of the fort flung open, creaking with the frost rust, and
+Hearne came out, followed by his little company, the dog bells of the
+long toboggan sleighs setting up a merry jingling as the huskies broke
+from a trot to a gallop over the snow-fields for the North.  Heading
+west-northwest, the band travelled swiftly with all the enthusiasm of
+untested courage.  North winds cut their faces like whip-lashes.  The
+first night out there was not enough snow to make a wind-break of the
+drifts; so the sleighs were piled on edge to windward, dogs and men
+lying heterogeneously in their shelter.  When morning came, one of the
+Indian guides had deserted.  The way became barer.  Frozen swamps
+across which the storm wind swept with hurricane force were succeeded
+by high, rocky barrens devoid of game, unsheltered, with barely enough
+stunted shrubbery for the whittling of chips that cooked the morning
+and night meals.  In a month the travellers had not accomplished ten
+miles a day.  Where deer were found the Indians halted to gorge
+themselves with feasts.  Where game was scarce they lay in camp,
+depending on the white hunters.  Within three weeks rations had
+dwindled to one partridge a day for the entire company.  The Indians
+seemed to think that Hearne's white servants had secret store of food
+on the sleighs.  The savages refused to hunt.  Then Hearne suspected
+some ulterior design.  It was to drive him back to the fort by famine.
+Henceforth, he noticed on the march that the Indians always preceded
+the whites and secured any game before his men could fire a shot.  One
+night toward the end of November the savages plundered the sleighs.
+Hearne awakened in amazement to see the company marching off, laden
+with guns, ammunition, and hatchets.  He called.  Their answer was
+laughter that set the woods ringing.  Hearne was now two hundred miles
+from the fort, without either ammunition or food.  There was nothing to
+do but turn back.  The weather was fair.  By snaring partridges, the
+white men obtained enough game to sustain them till they reached the
+fort on the 11th of December.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-250"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-250.jpg" ALT="Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle." BORDER="2" WIDTH="396" HEIGHT="313">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The question now was whether to wait till spring or set out in the
+teeth of midwinter.  If Hearne left the fort in spring, he could not
+possibly reach the Arctic Circle till the following winter; and with
+the North buried under drifts of snow, he could not learn where lay the
+Northwest Passage.  If he left the fort in winter in order to reach the
+Arctic in summer, he must expose his guides to the risks of cold and
+starvation.  The Indians told of high, rocky barrens, across which no
+canoes could be carried.  They advised snow-shoe travel.  Obtaining
+three Chipewyans and two Crees as guides, and taking no white servants,
+Hearne once more set out, on February 23, 1770, for the "Far-Away-Metal
+River."  This time there was no cannonading.  The guns were buried
+under snow-drifts twenty feet deep, and the snow-shoes of the
+travellers glided over the fort walls to the echoing cheers of soldiers
+and governor standing on the ramparts.  The company travelled light,
+depending on chance game for food.  All wood that could be used for
+fire lay hidden deep under snow.  At wide intervals over the white
+wastes mushroom cones of snow told where a stunted tree projected the
+antlered branches of topmost bough through the depths of drift; but for
+the most part camp was made by digging through the shallowest snow with
+snow-shoes to the bottom of moss, which served the double purpose of
+fuel for the night kettle and bed for travellers.  In the hollow a
+wigwam was erected, with the door to the south, away from the north
+wind.  Snared rabbits and partridges supplied the food.  The way lay as
+before&mdash;west-northwest&mdash;along a chain of frozen lakes and rivers
+connecting Hudson Bay with the Arctic Ocean.  By April the marchers
+were on the margin of a desolate wilderness&mdash;the Indian region of
+"Little Sticks,"&mdash;known to white men as the Barren Lands, where dwarf
+trees project above the billowing wastes of snow like dismantled masts
+on the far offing of a lonely sea.  Game became scarcer.  Neither the
+round footprint of the hare nor the frost tracery of the northern
+grouse marked the snowy reaches of unbroken white.  Caribou had
+retreated to the sheltered woods of the interior; and a cleverer hunter
+than man had scoured the wide wastes of game.  Only the wolf pack
+roamed the Barren Lands.  It was unsafe to go on without food.  Hearne
+kept in camp till the coming of the goose month&mdash;April&mdash;when birds of
+passage wended their way north.  For three days rations consisted of
+snow water and pipes of tobacco.  The Indians endured the privations
+with stoical indifference, daily marching out on a bootless quest for
+game.  On the third night Hearne was alone in his tent.  Twilight
+deepened to night, night to morning.  Still no hunters returned.  Had
+he been deserted?  Not a sound broke the waste silence but the baying
+of the wolf pack.  Weak from hunger, Hearne fell asleep.  Before
+daylight he was awakened by a shout; and his Indians shambled over the
+drifts laden with haunches of half a dozen deer.  That relieved want
+till the coming of the geese.  In May Hearne struck across the Barren
+Lands.  By June the rotting snow clogged the snow-shoes.  Dog trains
+drew heavy, and food was again scarce.  For a week the travellers found
+nothing to eat but cranberries.  Half the company was ill from hunger
+when a mangy old musk-ox, shedding his fur and lean as barrel hoops,
+came scrambling over the rocks, sure of foot as a mountain goat.  A
+single shot brought him down.  In spite of the musky odor of which the
+coarse flesh reeked, every morsel of the ox was instantly devoured.
+Sometimes during their long fasts they would encounter a solitary
+Indian wandering over the rocky barren.  If he had arms, gun, or arrow,
+and carried skins of the chase, he was welcomed to camp, no matter how
+scant the fare.  Otherwise he was shunned as an outcast, never to be
+touched or addressed by a human being; for only one thing could have
+fed an Indian on the Barren Lands who could show no trophies of the
+chase, and that was the flesh of some human creature weaker than
+himself.  The outcast was a cannibal, condemned by an unwritten law to
+wander alone through the wastes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Snow had barely cleared from the Barren Lands when Hearne witnessed the
+great traverse of the caribou herds, marching in countless multitudes
+with a clicking of horns and hoofs from west to east for the summer.
+Indians from all parts of the North had placed themselves at rivers
+across the line of march to spear the caribou as they swam; and Hearne
+was joined by a company of six hundred savages.  Summer had dried the
+moss.  That gave abundance of fuel.  Caribou were plentiful.  That
+supplied the hunters with pemmican.  Hearne decided to pass the
+following winter with the Indians; but he was one white man among
+hundreds of savages.  Nightly his ammunition was plundered.  One of his
+survey instruments was broken in a wind storm.  Others were stolen.  It
+was useless to go on without instruments to take observations of the
+Arctic Circle; so for a second time Hearne was compelled to turn back
+to Fort Prince of Wales.  Terrible storms impeded the return march.
+His dog was frozen in the traces.  Tent poles were used for fire-wood;
+and the northern lights served as the only compass.  On midday of
+November 25, 1770, after eight months' absence, in which he had not
+found the "Far-Off-Metal River," Hearne reached shelter inside the fort
+walls.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Beating through the gales of sleet and snow on the homeward march,
+Hearne had careened into a majestic figure half shrouded by the storm.
+The explorer halted before a fur-muffled form, six feet in its
+moccasins, erect as a mast pole, haughty as a king; and the gauntleted
+hand of the Indian chief went up to his forehead in sign of peace.  It
+was Matonabbee, the ambassador of the Hudson's Bay Company to the
+Athabascans, now returning to Fort Prince of Wales, followed by a long
+line of slave women driving their dog sleighs.  The two travellers
+hailed each other through the storm like ships at sea.  That night they
+camped together on the lee side of the dog sleighs, piled high as a
+wind-break; and Matonabbee, the famous courser of the Northern wastes,
+gave Hearne wise advice.  Women should be taken on a long journey, the
+Indian chief said; for travel must be swift through the deadly cold of
+the barrens.  Men must travel light of hand, trusting to chance game
+for food.  Women were needed to snare rabbits, catch partridges, bring
+in game shot by the braves, and attend to the camping.  And then in a
+burst of enthusiasm, perhaps warmed by Hearne's fine tobacco,
+Matonabbee, who had found the way to the Athabasca, offered to conduct
+the white man to the "Far-Off-Metal River" of the Arctic Circle.  The
+chief was the greatest pathfinder of the Northern tribes.  His offer
+was the chance of a lifetime.  Hearne could hardly restrain his
+eagerness till he reached the fort.  Leaving Matonabbee to follow with
+the slave women, the explorer hurried to Fort Prince of Wales, laid the
+plan before Governor Norton, and in less than two weeks from the day of
+his return was ready to depart for the unknown river that was to lead
+to the Northwest Passage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The weather was dazzlingly clear, with that burnished brightness of
+polished steel known only where unbroken sunlight meets unbroken snow
+glare.  On the 7th of December, 1770, Hearne left the fort, led by
+Matonabbee and followed by the slave Indians with the dog sleighs.  One
+of Matonabbee's wives lay ill; but that did not hinder the iron
+pathfinder.  The woman was wrapped in robes and drawn on a dog sleigh.
+There was neither pause nor hesitation.  If the woman recovered, good.
+If she died, they would bury her under a cairn of stones as they
+travelled.  Matonabbee struck directly west-northwest for some <I>caches</I>
+of provisions which he had left hidden on the trail.  The place was
+found; but the <I>caches</I> had been rifled clean of food.  That did not
+stop Matonabbee.  Nor did he show the slightest symptoms of anger.  He
+simply hastened their pace the more for their hunger, recognizing the
+unwritten law of the wilderness&mdash;that starving hunters who had rifled
+the <I>cache</I> had a right to food wherever they found it.  Day after day,
+stoical as men of bronze, the marchers reeled off the long white miles
+over the snowy wastes, pausing only for night sleep with evening and
+morning meals.  Here nibbled twigs were found; there the stamping
+ground of a deer shelter; elsewhere the small, cleft foot-mark like the
+ace of hearts.  But the signs were all old.  No deer were seen.  Even
+the black marble eye that betrays the white hare on the snow, and the
+fluffy bird track of the feather-footed northern grouse, grew rarer;
+and the slave women came in every morning empty-handed from untouched
+snares.  In spite of hunger and cold, Matonabbee remained good-natured,
+imperturbable, hard as a man of bronze, coursing with the winged speed
+of snow-shoes from morning till night without pause, going to a bed of
+rock moss on a meal of snow water and rising eager as an arrow to leave
+the bow-string for the next day's march.  For three days before
+Christmas the entire company had no food but snow.  Christmas was
+celebrated by starvation.  Hearne could not indulge in the despair of
+the civilized man's self-pity when his faithful guides went on without
+complaint.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-258"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-258.jpg" ALT="Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun.--C. W. Mathers." BORDER="2" WIDTH="396" HEIGHT="548">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun.--C. W. Mathers.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+By January the company had entered the Barren Lands.  The Barren Lands
+were bare but for an occasional oasis of trees like an island of refuge
+in a shelterless sea.  In the clumps of dwarf shrubs, the Indians found
+signs that meant relief from famine&mdash;tufts of hair rubbed off on tree
+trunks, fallen antlers, and countless heart-shaped tracks barely
+puncturing the snow but for the sharp outer edge.  The caribou were on
+their yearly traverse east to west for the shelter of the inland woods.
+The Indians at once pitched camp.  Scouts went scouring to find which
+way the caribou herds were coming.  Pounds of snares were constructed
+of shrubs and saplings stuck up in palisades with scarecrows on the
+pickets round a V-shaped enclosure.  The best hunters took their
+station at the angle of the V, armed with loaded muskets and long,
+lank, and iron-pointed arrows.  Women and children lined the palisades
+to scare back high jumpers or strays of the caribou herd.  Then scouts
+and dogs beat up the rear of the fleeing herd, driving the caribou
+straight for the pound.  By a curious provision of nature, the male
+caribou sheds its antlers just as he leaves the Barren Lands for the
+wooded interior, where the horns would impede flight through brush, and
+he only leaves the woods for the bare open when the horns are grown
+enough to fight the annual battle to protect the herd from the wolf
+pack ravenous with spring hunger.  For one caribou caught in the pound
+by Hearne's Indians, a hundred of the herd escaped; for the caribou
+crossed the Barrens in tens of thousands, and Matonabbee's braves
+obtained enough venison for the trip to the "Far-Off-Metal River."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The farther north they travelled the scanter became the growth of pine
+and poplar and willow.  Snow still lay heavy in April; but Matonabbee
+ordered a halt while there was still large enough wood to construct
+dugouts to carry provisions down the river.  The boats were built large
+and heavy in front, light behind.  This was to resist the ice jam of
+Northern currents.  The caribou hunt had brought other Indians to the
+Barren Lands.  Matonabbee was joined by two hundred warriors.  Though
+the tribes puffed the calumet of peace together, they drew their war
+hatchets when they saw the smoke of an alien tribe's fire rise against
+the northern sky.  A suspicion that he hardly dared to acknowledge
+flashed through Hearne's mind.  Eleven thousand beaver pelts were
+yearly brought down to the fort from the unknown river.  How did the
+Chipewyans obtain these pelts from the Eskimo?  What was the real
+reason of the Indian eagerness to conduct the white man to the
+"Far-Off-Metal River"?  The white man was not taken into the confidence
+of the Indian council; but he could not fail to draw his own
+conclusions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Scouts were sent cautiously forward to trail the path of the aliens who
+had lighted the far moss fire.  Women and children were ordered to head
+about for a rendezvous southwest on Lake Athabasca.  Carrying only the
+lightest supplies, the braves set out swiftly for the North on June 1.
+Mist and rain hung so heavily over the desolate moors that the
+travellers could not see twenty feet ahead.  In places the rocks were
+glazed with ice and scored with runnels of water.  Half the warriors
+here lost heart and turned back.  The others led by Hearne and
+Matonabbee crossed the iced precipices on hands and knees, with gun
+stocks strapped to backs or held in teeth.  On the 21st of June the sun
+did not set.  Hearne had crossed the Arctic Circle.  The sun hung on
+the southern horizon all night long.  Henceforth the travellers marched
+without tents.  During rain or snow storm, they took refuge under rocks
+or in caves.  Provisions turned mouldy with wet.  The moss was too
+soaked for fire.  Snow fell so heavily in drifting storms that Hearne
+often awakened in the morning to find himself almost immured in the
+cave where they had sought shelter.  Ice lay solid on the lakes in
+July.  Once, clambering up steep, bare heights, the travellers met a
+herd of a hundred musk-oxen scrambling over the rocks with the agility
+of squirrels, the spreading, agile hoof giving grip that lifted the
+hulking forms over all obstacles.  Down the bleak, bare heights there
+poured cataract and mountain torrent, plainly leading to some near
+river bed; but the thick gray fog lay on the land like a blanket.  At
+last a thunder-storm cleared the air; and Hearne saw bleak moors
+sloping north, bare of all growth but the trunks of burnt trees, with
+barren heights of rock and vast, desolate swamps, where the wild-fowl
+flocked in myriads.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-262"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-262.jpg" ALT="Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago." BORDER="2" WIDTH="382" HEIGHT="210">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+All count of day and night was now lost, for the sun did not set.
+Sometime between midnight and morning of July 12, 1771, with the sun as
+bright as noon, the lakes converged to a single river-bed a hundred
+yards wide, narrowing to a waterfall that roared over the rocks in
+three cataracts.  This, then, was the "Far-Off-Metal River."  Plainly,
+it was a disappointing discovery, this Coppermine River.  It did not
+lead to China.  It did not point the way to a Northwest Passage.  In
+his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North
+America had learned&mdash;that the Great Northwest was something more than a
+bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its
+own destiny.[1]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Hearne had no time to brood over disappointment.  The conduct of
+his rascally companions could no longer be misunderstood.  Hunters came
+in with game; but when the hungry slaves would have lighted a moss fire
+to cook the meat, the forbidding hand of a chief went up.  No fires
+were to be lighted.  The Indians advanced with whispers, dodging from
+stone to stone like raiders in ambush.  Spies went forward on tiptoe.
+Then far down-stream below the cataracts Hearne descried the domed
+tent-tops of an Eskimo band sound asleep; for it was midnight, though
+the sun was at high noon.  When Hearne looked back to his companions,
+he found himself deserted.  The Indians were already wading the river
+for the west bank, where the Eskimo had camped.  Hearne overtook his
+guides stripping themselves of everything that might impede flight or
+give hand-hold to an enemy, and daubing their skin with war-paint.
+Hearne begged Matonabbee to restrain the murderous warriors.  The great
+chief smiled with silent contempt.  He was too true a disciple of a
+doctrine which Indians' practised hundreds of years before white men
+had avowed it&mdash;the survival of the fit, the extermination of the weak,
+for any qualms of pity towards a victim whose death would contribute
+profit.  Wearing only moccasins and bucklers of hardened hide, armed
+with muskets, lances, and tomahawks, the Indians jostled Hearne out of
+their way, stole forward from stone to stone to within a gun length of
+the Eskimo, then with a wild war shout flung themselves on the
+unsuspecting sleepers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Eskimo were taken unprepared.  They staggered from their tents,
+still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which
+they had never before heard.  The poor creatures fled in frantic
+terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt.  A young girl fell
+coiling at Hearne's feet like a wounded snake.  A well-aimed lance had
+pinioned the living form to earth.  She caught Hearne round the knees,
+imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back
+with jeers.  Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put
+their victim out of pain.  The rocks rang with the mockery of the
+torturers.  She was speared to death before Hearne's eyes.  On that
+scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer bear to
+look.  He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a
+nightmare.  Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide
+boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing
+down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless
+as stone was an old, old woman&mdash;probably a witch of the tribe&mdash;red-eyed
+as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of
+all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls.  There was a shout
+from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate;
+and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as
+insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack.  Odd commentary in our
+modern philosophies&mdash;this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned,
+weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by
+bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to
+jostle the Indian from the face of the New World.  Something more than
+a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a
+race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak,
+vacillating Hearne, weeping like a woman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Horror of the massacre robbed Hearne of all an explorer's exultation.
+A day afterward, on July 17, he stood on the shores of the Arctic
+Ocean,&mdash;the first white man to reach it overland in America.  Ice
+extended from the mouth of the river as far as eye could see.  Not a
+sign of land broke the endless reaches of cold steel, where the snow
+lay, and icy green, where pools of the ocean cast their reflection on
+the sky of the far horizon.  At one in the morning, with the sun
+hanging above the river to the south, Hearne formally took possession
+of the Arctic regions for the Hudson's Bay Company.  The same Company
+rules those regions to-day.  Not an eye had been closed for three days
+and nights.  Throwing themselves down on the wet shore, the entire band
+now slept for six hours.  The hunters awakened to find a musk-ox nosing
+over the mossed rocks.  A shot sent it tumbling over the cliffs.
+Whether it was that the moss was too wet for fuel to cook the meat, or
+the massacre had brutalized the men into beasts of prey, the Indians
+fell on the carcass and devoured it raw.[2]
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-266"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-266.jpg" ALT="Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's Drawing, 1733-47." BORDER="2" WIDTH="346" HEIGHT="503">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's Drawing, 1733-47.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The retreat from the Arctic was made with all swiftness, keeping close
+to the Coppermine River.  For thirty miles from the sea not a tree was
+to be seen.  The river was sinuous and narrow, hemmed in by walls of
+solid rock, down which streamed cascades and mountain torrents.  On
+both sides of the high bank extended endless reaches of swamps and
+barrens.  Twenty miles from the sea Hearne found the copper mines from
+which the Indians made their weapons.  His guides were to join their
+families in the Athabasca country of the southwest, and thither
+Matonabbee now led the way at such a terrible pace that moccasins were
+worn to shreds and toe-nails torn from the feet of the marchers; and
+woe to the man who fell behind, for the wolf pack prowled on the rear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the smoke of moss fires told of the wives' camp, the Indians
+halted to take the sweat bath of purification for the cleansing of all
+blood guilt from the massacre.  Heated stones were thrown into a small
+pool.  In this each Indian bathed himself, invoking his deity for
+freedom from all punishment for the deaths of the slain.[3]  By August
+the Indians had joined their wives.  By October they were on Lake
+Athabasca, which had already frozen.  Here one of the wives, in the
+last stages of consumption, could go no farther.  For a band short of
+food to halt on the march meant death to all.  The Northern wilderness
+has its grim unwritten law, inexorable and merciless as death.  For
+those who fall by the way there is no pity.  A whole tribe may not be
+exposed to death for the sake of one person.  Civilized nations follow
+the same principle in their quarantine.  Giving the squaw food and a
+tent, the Indians left her to meet her last enemy, whether death came
+by starvation or cold or the wolf pack.  Again and again the abandoned
+squaw came up with the marchers, weeping and begging their pity, only
+to fall from weakness.  But the wilderness has no pity; and so they
+left her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Christmas of 1771 was passed on Athabasca Lake, the northern lights
+rustling overhead with the crackling of a flag.  There was food in
+plenty; for the Athabasca was rich in buffalo meadows and beaver dams
+and moose yards.  On the lake shore Hearne found a little cabin, in
+which dwelt a solitary woman of the Dog Rib tribe who for eight months
+had not seen a soul.  Her band had been massacred.  She alone escaped
+and had lived here in hiding for almost a year.  In spring the Indians
+of the lake carried their furs to the forts of Hudson Bay.  With the
+Athabascans went Hearne, reaching Fort Prince of Wales on June 30,
+1772, after eighteen months' absence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had discovered Coppermine River, the Arctic Ocean, and the Athabasca
+country,&mdash;a region in all as large as half European Russia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For his achievements Hearne received prompt promotion.  Within a year
+of his return to the fort, Governor Norton, the Indian bully, fell
+deadly ill.  In the agony of death throes, he called for his wives.
+The great keys to the apartments of the women were taken from his
+pillow, and the wives were brought in.  Norton lay convulsed with pain.
+One of the younger women began to sob.  An officer of the garrison took
+her hand to comfort her grief.  Norton's rolling eyes caught sight of
+the innocent conference between the officer and the young wife.  With a
+roar the dying bully hurled himself up in bed:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll burn you alive!  I'll burn you alive," he shrieked.  With oaths
+on his lips he fell back dead.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-270"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-270.jpg" ALT="Fort Prince of Wales (Churchill), from Hearne's Account, 1799 Edition." BORDER="2" WIDTH="397" HEIGHT="270">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Fort Prince of Wales (Churchill), from Hearne's Account,
+1799 Edition.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Samuel Hearne became governor of the fort.  For ten years nothing
+disturbed the calm of his rule.  Marie, Norton's daughter, still lived
+in the shelter of the fort; the wives found consolation in other
+husbands; and Matonabbee continued the ambassador of the company to
+strange tribes.  One afternoon of August, 1782, the sleepy calm of the
+fort was upset by the sentry dashing in breathlessly with news that
+three great vessels of war with full-blown sails and carrying many guns
+were ploughing straight for Prince of Wales.  At sundown the ships
+swung at anchor six miles from the fort.  From their masts fluttered a
+foreign flag&mdash;the French ensign.  Gig boat and pinnace began sounding
+the harbor.  Hearne had less than forty men to defend the fort.  In the
+morning four hundred French troopers lined up on Churchill River, and
+the admiral, La Perouse, sent a messenger with demand of surrender.
+Hearne did not feel justified in exposing his men to the attack of
+three warships carrying from seventy to a hundred guns apiece, and to
+assault by land of four hundred troopers.  He surrendered without a
+blow.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-271"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-271.jpg" ALT="Beaver Coin of Hudson's Bay Company, melted from Old Tea Chests, one Coin representing one Beaver." BORDER="2" WIDTH="331" HEIGHT="156">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Beaver Coin of Hudson's Bay Company, melted from Old Tea
+Chests, <BR>one Coin representing one Beaver.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The furs were quickly transferred to the French ships, and the soldiers
+were turned loose to loot the fort.  The Indians fled, among them Moses
+Norton's gentle daughter, now in her twenty-second year.  She could not
+revert to the loathsome habits of savage life; she dared not go to the
+fort filled with lawless foreign soldiers; and she perished of
+starvation outside the walls.  Matonabbee had been absent when the
+French came.  He returned to find the fort where he had spent his life
+in ruins.  The English whom he thought invincible were defeated and
+prisoners of war.  Hearne, whom the dauntless old chief had led through
+untold perils, was a captive.  Matonabbee's proud spirit was broken.
+The grief was greater than he could bear.  All that living stood for
+had been lost.  Drawing off from observation, Matonabbee blew his
+brains out.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] I have purposely avoided bringing up the dispute as to a mistake of
+some few degrees made by Hearne in his calculations&mdash;the point really
+being finical.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[2] I am sorry to say that in pioneer border warfares I have heard of
+white men acting in a precisely similar beastly manner after some
+brutal conflict.  To be frank, I know of one case in the early days of
+Minnesota fur trade, where the irate fur trader killed and devoured his
+weak companion, not from famine, but sheer frenzy of brutalized
+passion.  Such naked light does wilderness life shed over our
+drawing-room philosophies of the triumphantly strong being the highest
+type of manhood.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[3] Again the wilderness plunges us back to the primordial: if man be
+but the supreme beast of prey, whence this consciousness of blood guilt
+in these unschooled children of the wilds?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART IV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1780-1793
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES&mdash;HOW MACKENZIE
+CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES AND LEWIS
+AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM
+MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER X
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1780-1793
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed
+across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the question of a
+Northwest Passage
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+There is an old saying that if a man has the right mettle in him, you
+may stick him a thousand leagues in the wilderness on a barren rock and
+he will plant pennies and grow dollar bills.  In other words, no matter
+where or how, success will succeed.  No class illustrates this better
+than a type that has almost passed away&mdash;the old fur traders who were
+lords of the wilderness.  Cut off from all comfort, from all
+encouragement, from all restraint, what set of men ever had fewer
+incentives to go up, more temptations to go down?  Yet from the fur
+traders sprang the pioneer heroes of America.  When young Donald Smith
+came out&mdash;a raw lad&mdash;to America, he was packed off to eighteen years'
+exile on the desert coast of Labrador.  Donald Smith came out of the
+wilderness to become the Lord Strathcona of to-day.  Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts.  A clerk in a
+counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit
+setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for
+furs.  Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper
+Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he
+fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions
+is murdered, a second lamed, a third wounded.  In all this Alexander
+Mackenzie was successful while still in the prime of his manhood,&mdash;not
+more than thirty years of age; and the reward of his success was to be
+exiled to the sub-arctics of the Athabasca, six weeks' travel from
+another fur post,&mdash;not a likely field to play the hero.  Yet Mackenzie
+emerged from the polar wilderness bearing a name that ranks with
+Columbus and Carrier and La Salle.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-276"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-276.jpg" ALT="Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer." BORDER="2" WIDTH="181" HEIGHT="293">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Far north of the Missouri beyond the borderlands flows the
+Saskatchewan.  As far north again, beyond the Saskatchewan, flows
+another great river, the Athabasca, into Athabasca Lake, on whose blue
+shores to the north lies a little white-washed fort of some twenty log
+houses, large barn-like stores, a Catholic chapel, an Episcopal
+mission, and a biggish residence of pretence for the chief trader.
+This is Fort Chipewyan.  At certain seasons Indian tepees dot the
+surrounding plains; and bronze-faced savages, clad in the ill-fitting
+garments of white people, shamble about the stores, or sit haunched
+round the shady sides of the log houses, smoking long-stemmed pipes.
+These are the Chipewyans come in from their hunting-grounds; but for
+the most part the fort seems chiefly populated by regiments of husky
+dogs, shaggy-coated, with the sharp nose of the fox, which spend the
+long winters in harness coasting the white wilderness, and pass the
+summers basking lazily all day long except when the bell rings for fish
+time, when half a hundred huskies scramble wildly for the first meat
+thrown.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A century ago Chipewyan was much the same as to-day, except that it lay
+on the south side of the lake.  Mails came only once in two years
+instead of monthly, and rival traders were engaged in the merry game of
+slitting each other's throats.  All together, it wasn't exactly the
+place for ambition to dream; but ambition was there in the person of
+Alexander Mackenzie, the young fur trader, dreaming what he hardly
+dared hope.  Business men fight shy of dreamers; so Mackenzie told his
+dreams to no one but his cousin Roderick, whom he pledged to secrecy.
+For fifty years the British government had offered a reward of 20,000
+pounds to any one who should discover a Northwest Passage between the
+Atlantic and the Pacific.  The hope of such a passageway had led many
+navigators on bootless voyages; and here was Mackenzie with the same
+bee in his bonnet.  To the north of Chipewyan he saw a mighty river,
+more than a mile wide in places, walled in by great ramparts, and
+flowing to unknown seas.  To the west he saw another river rolling
+through the far mountains.  Where did this river come from, and where
+did both rivers go?  Mackenzie was not the man to leave vital questions
+unanswered.  He determined to find out; but difficulties lay in the
+way.  He couldn't leave the Athabascan posts.  That was overcome by
+getting his cousin Roderick to take charge.  The Northwest Fur Company,
+which had succeeded the French fur traders of Quebec and Montreal when
+Canada passed from the hands of the French to the English, wouldn't
+assume any cost or risk for exploring unknown seas.  This was more
+niggardly than the Hudson's Bay Company, which had paid all cost of
+outlay for its explorers; but Mackenzie assumed risk and cost himself.
+Then the Indians hesitated to act as guides; so Mackenzie hired guides
+when he could, seized them by compulsion when he couldn't hire them,
+and went ahead without guides when they escaped.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-278"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-278.jpg" ALT="Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for the Value of Three Beaver Skins." BORDER="2" WIDTH="382" HEIGHT="420">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, <BR>
+for the Value of Three Beaver Skins.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+May&mdash;the frog moon&mdash;and June&mdash;the bird's egg moon&mdash;were the festive
+seasons at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca.  Indian hunters came
+tramping in from the Barren Lands with toboggan loads of pelts drawn by
+half-wild husky dogs.  Woody Crees and Slaves and Chipewyans paddled
+across the lake in canoes laden to the gunwales with furs.  A world of
+white skin tepees sprang up like mushrooms round the fur post.  By June
+the traders had collected the furs, sorted and shipped them in
+flotillas of keel boat, barge, and canoe, east to Lake Superior and
+Montreal.  On the evening of June 2, 1789, Alexander Mackenzie, chief
+trader, had finished the year's trade and sent the furs to the Eastern
+warehouses of the Northwest Company, on Lake Superior, at Fort William,
+not far from where Radisson had first explored, and La V�rendrye
+followed.  Indians lingered round the fort of the Northern lake engaged
+in mad <I>boissons</I>, or drinking matches, that used up a winter's
+earnings in the spree of a single week.  Along the shore lay upturned
+canoes, keels red against the blue of the lake, and everywhere in the
+dark burned the red fires of the boatmen melting resin to gum the seams
+of the canoes; for the canoes were to be launched on a long voyage the
+next day.  Mackenzie was going to float down with the current of the
+Athabasca or Grand River, and find out where that great river emptied
+in the North.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The crew must have spent the night in a last wild spree; for it was
+nine in the morning before all hands were ready to embark.  In
+Mackenzie's large birch canoe went four Canadian <I>voyageurs</I>, their
+Indian wives, and a German.  In other canoes were the Indian hunters
+and interpreters, led by "English Chief," who had often been to Hudson
+Bay.  Few provisions were taken.  The men were to hunt, the women to
+cook and keep the <I>voyageurs</I> supplied with moccasins, which wore out
+at the rate of one pair a day for each man.  Traders bound for Slave
+Lake followed behind.  Only fifty miles were made the first day.
+Henceforth Mackenzie embarked his men at three and four in the morning.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-281"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-281.jpg" ALT="Quill and Bead Work on Buckskin, Mackenzie River Indians." BORDER="2" WIDTH="210" HEIGHT="307">
+<H4>
+[Illustration:  Quill and Bead Work on Buckskin, Mackenzie River Indians.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The mouth of Peace River was passed a mile broad as it pours down from
+the west, and the boatmen <I>portaged</I> six rapids the third day, one of
+the canoes, steered by a squaw more intent on her sewing than the
+paddles, going over the falls with a smash that shivered the bark to
+kindling-wood.  The woman escaped, as the current caught the canoe, by
+leaping into the water and swimming ashore with the aid of a line.  Ice
+four feet thick clung to the walls of the rampart shores, and this
+increased the danger of landing for a <I>portage</I>, the Indians whining
+out their complaints in exactly the tone of the wailing north wind that
+had cradled their lives&mdash;"Eduiy, eduiy!&mdash;It is hard, white man, it is
+hard!"  And harder the way became.  For nine nights fog lay so heavily
+on the river that not a star was seen.  This was followed by driving
+rain and wind.  Mackenzie hoisted a three-foot sail and cut over the
+water before the wind with the hiss of a boiling kettle.  Though the
+sail did the work of the paddles, it gave the <I>voyageurs</I> no respite.
+Cramped and rain-soaked, they had to bail out water to keep the canoe
+afloat.  In this fashion the boats entered Slave Lake, a large body of
+water with one horn pointing west, the other east.  Out of both horns
+led unknown rivers.  Which way should Mackenzie go?  Low-lying
+marshlands&mdash;beaver meadows where the wattled houses of the beaver had
+stopped up the current of streams till moss overgrew the swamps and the
+land became quaking muskeg&mdash;lay along the shores of the lake.  There
+were islands in deep water, where caribou had taken refuge, travelling
+over ice in winter for the calves to be safe in summer from wolf pack
+and bear.  Mackenzie hired a guide from the Slave Indians to pilot the
+canoes over the lake; but the man proved useless.  Days were wasted
+poking through mist and rushes trying to find an outlet to the Grand
+River of the North.  Finally, English Chief lost his temper and
+threatened to kill the Slave Indian unless he succeeded in taking the
+canoes out of the lake.  The waters presently narrowed to half a mile;
+the current began to race with a hiss; sails were hoisted on
+fishing-poles; and Mackenzie found himself out of the rushes on the
+Grand River to the west of Slave Lake.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-283"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-283.jpg" ALT="Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior." BORDER="2" WIDTH="390" HEIGHT="237">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Here pause was made at a camp of Dog Ribs, who took the bottom from the
+courage of Mackenzie's comrades by gruesome predictions that old age
+would come upon the <I>voyageurs</I> before they reached salt water.  There
+were impassable falls ahead.  The river flowed through a land of famine
+peopled by a monstrous race of hostiles who massacred all Indians from
+the South.  The effect of these cheerful prophecies was that the Slave
+Lake guide refused to go on.  English Chief bodily put the recalcitrant
+into a canoe and forced him ahead at the end of a paddle.  Snow-capped
+mountains loomed to the west.  The river from Bear Lake was passed,
+greenish of hue like the sea, and the Slave Lake guide now feigned such
+illness that watch was kept day and night to prevent his escape.  The
+river now began to wind, with lofty ramparts on each side; and once, at
+a sharp bend in the current, Mackenzie looked back to see Slave Lake
+Indians following to aid the guide in escaping.  After that one of the
+white men slept with the fellow each night to prevent desertion; but
+during the confusion of a terrific thunder-storm, when tents and
+cooking utensils were hurled about their heads, the Slave succeeded in
+giving his watchers the slip.  Mackenzie promptly stopped at an
+encampment of strange Indians, and failing to obtain another guide by
+persuasion, seized and hoisted a protesting savage into the big canoe,
+and signalled the unwilling captive to point the way.  The Indians of
+the river were indifferent, if not friendly; but once Mackenzie
+discovered a band hiding their women and children as soon as the
+boatmen came in view.  The unwilling guide was forced ashore, as
+interpreter, and gifts pacified all fear.  But the incident left its
+impression on Mackenzie's comrades.  They had now been away from
+Chipewyan for forty days.  If it took much longer to go back, ice would
+imprison them in the polar wilderness.  Snow lay drifted in the
+valleys, and scarcely any game was seen but fox and grouse.  The river
+was widening almost to the dimensions of a lake, and when this was
+whipped by a north wind the canoes were in peril enough.  The four
+Canadians besought Mackenzie to return.  To return Mackenzie had not
+the slightest intention; but he would not tempt mutiny.  He promised
+that if he did not find the sea within seven days, he would go back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That night the sun hung so high above the southern horizon that the men
+rose by mistake to embark at twelve o'clock.  They did not realize that
+they were in the region of midnight sun; but Mackenzie knew and
+rejoiced, for he must be near the sea.  The next day he was not
+surprised to find a deserted Eskimo village.  At that sight the
+enthusiasm of the others took fire.  They were keen to reach the sea,
+and imagined that they smelt salt water.  In spite of the lakelike
+expanse of the river, the current was swift, and the canoes went ahead
+at the rate of sixty and seventy miles a day&mdash;if it could be called day
+when there was no night.  Between the 13th and 14th of July the
+<I>voyageurs</I> suddenly awakened to find themselves and their baggage
+floating in rising water.  What had happened to the lake?  Their hearts
+took a leap; for it was no lake.  It was the tide.  They had found the
+sea.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How hilariously jubilant were Mackenzie's men, one may guess from the
+fact that they chased whales all the next day in their canoes.  The
+whales dived below, fortunately; for one blow of a finback or sulphur
+bottom would have played skittles with the canoes.  Coming back from
+the whale hunt, triumphant as if they had caught a dozen finbacks, the
+men erected a post, engraving on it the date, July 14, 1789, and the
+names of all present.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It had taken six weeks to reach the Arctic.  It took eight to return to
+Chipewyan, for the course was against stream, in many places tracking
+the canoes by a tow-line.  The beaver meadows along the shore impeded
+the march.  Many a time the quaking moss gave way, and the men sank to
+mid-waist in water.  While skirting close ashore, Mackenzie discovered
+the banks of the river to be on fire.  The fire was a natural tar bed,
+which the Indians said had been burning for centuries and which burns
+to-day as when Mackenzie found it.  On September 12, with a high sail
+up and a driving wind, the canoes cut across Lake Athabasca and reached
+the beach of Chipewyan at three in the afternoon, after one hundred and
+two days' absence.  Mackenzie had not found the Northwest Passage.  He
+had proved there was no Northwest Passage, and discovered the
+Mississippi of the north&mdash;Mackenzie River.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-286"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-286.jpg" ALT="Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River." BORDER="2" WIDTH="625" HEIGHT="410">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Mackenzie spent the long winter at Fort Chipewyan; but just as soon as
+the rivers cleared of ice, he took passage in the east-bound canoes and
+hurried down to the Grand Portage or Fort William on Lake Superior, the
+headquarters of the Northwest Company, where he reported his discovery
+of Mackenzie River.  His report was received with utter indifference.
+The company had other matters to think about.  It was girding itself
+for the life-and-death struggle with its rival, the Hudson's Bay
+Company.  "My expedition was hardly spoken of, but that is what I
+expected," he writes to his cousin.  But chagrin did not deter purpose.
+He asked the directors' permission to explore that other broad
+stream&mdash;Peace River&mdash;rolling down from the mountains.  His request was
+granted.  Winter saw him on furlough in England, studying astronomy and
+surveying for the next expedition.  Here he heard much of the Western
+Sea&mdash;the Pacific&mdash;that fired his eagerness.  The voyages of Cook and
+Hanna and Meares were on everybody's lips.  Spain and England and
+Russia were each pushing for first possession of the northwest coast.
+Mackenzie hurried back to his Company's fort on the banks of Peace
+River, where he spent a restless winter waiting for navigation to open.
+Doubts of his own ambitions began to trouble him.  What if Peace River
+did not lead to the west coast at all?  What if he were behind some
+other discoverer sent out by the Spaniards or the Russians?  "I have
+been so vexed of late that I cannot sit down to anything steadily," he
+confesses in a letter to his cousin.  Such a tissue-paper wall
+separates the aims of the real hero from those of the fool, that almost
+every ambitious man must pass through these periods of self-doubt
+before reaching the goal of his hopes.  But despondency did not benumb
+Mackenzie into apathy, as it has weaker men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By April he had shipped the year's furs from the forks of Peace River
+to Chipewyan.  By May his season's work was done.  He was ready to go
+up Peace River.  A birch canoe thirty feet long, lined with lightest of
+cedar, was built.  In this were stored pemmican and powder.  Alexander
+Mackay, a clerk of the company, was chosen as first assistant.  Six
+Canadian <I>voyageurs</I>&mdash;two of whom had accompanied Mackenzie to the
+Arctic&mdash;and two Indian hunters made up the party of ten who stepped
+into the canoes at seven in the evening of May 9, 1793.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Peace River tore down from the mountains flooded with spring thaw.  The
+crew soon realized that paddles must be bent against the current of a
+veritable mill-race; but it was safer going against, than with, such a
+current, for unknown dangers could be seen from below instead of above,
+where suction would whirl a canoe on the rocks.  Keen air foretold the
+nearing mountains.  In less than a week snow-capped peaks had crowded
+the canoe in a narrow ca�on below a tumbling cascade where the river
+was one wild sheet of tossing foam as far as eye could see.  The
+difficulty was to land; for precipices rose on each side in a wall,
+down which rolled enormous boulders and land-slides of loose earth.  To
+<I>portage</I> goods up these walls was impossible.  Fastening an
+eighty-foot tow-line to the bow, Mackenzie leaped to the declivity, axe
+in hand, cut foothold along the face of the steep cliff to a place
+where he could jump to level rock, and then, turning, signalled through
+the roar of the rapids for his men to come on.  The <I>voyageurs</I> were
+paralyzed with fear.  They stripped themselves ready to swim if they
+missed the jump, then one by one vaulted from foothold to foothold
+where Mackenzie had cut till they came to the final jump across water.
+Here Mackenzie caught each on his shoulders as the <I>voyageurs</I> leaped.
+The tow-line was then passed round trees growing on the edge of the
+precipice, and the canoe tracked up the raging cascade.  The waves
+almost lashed the frail craft to pieces.  Once a wave caught her
+sideways; the tow-line snapped like a pistol shot, for just one instant
+the canoe hung poised, and then the back-wash of an enormous boulder
+drove her bow foremost ashore, where the <I>voyageurs</I> regained the
+tow-line.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-290"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-290.jpg" ALT="Slave Lake Indians." BORDER="2" WIDTH="392" HEIGHT="312">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Slave Lake Indians.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The men had not bargained on this kind of work.  They bluntly declared
+that it was absurd trying to go up ca�ons with such cascades.
+Mackenzie paid no heed to the murmurings.  He got his crew to the top
+of the hill, spread out the best of a regale&mdash;including tea sweetened
+with sugar&mdash;and while the men were stimulating courage by a feast, he
+went ahead to reconnoitre the gorge.  Windfalls of enormous spruce
+trees, with a thickness twice the height of a man, lay on a steep
+declivity of sliding rock.  Up this climbed Mackenzie, clothes torn to
+tatters by devil's club (a thorn bush with spines like needles), boots
+hacked to pieces by the sharp rocks, and feet gashed with cuts.  The
+prospect was not bright.  As far as he could see the river was one
+succession of cataracts fifty feet wide walled in by stupendous
+precipices, down which rolled great boulders, shattering to pebbles as
+they fell.  The men were right.  No canoe could go up that stream.
+Mackenzie came back, set his men to repairing the canoe and making axe
+handles, to avoid the idleness that breeds mutiny, and sent Mackay
+ahead to see how far the rapids extended.  Mackay reported that the
+<I>portage</I> would be nine miles over the mountain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Leading the way, axe in hand, Mackenzie began felling trees so that the
+trunks formed an outer railing to prevent a fall down the precipice.
+Up this trail they warped the canoe by pulling the tow-line round
+stumps, five men going in advance to cut the way, five hauling and
+pushing the canoe.  In one day progress was three miles.  By five in
+the afternoon the men were so exhausted that they went to bed&mdash;if bare
+ground with sky overhead could be called bed.  One thing alone
+encouraged them: as they rose higher up the mountain side, they saw
+that the green edges of the glaciers and the eternal snows projected
+over the precipices.  They were nearing the summit&mdash;they must surely
+soon cross the Divide.  The air grew colder.  For three days the
+choppers worked in their blanket coats.  When they finally got the
+canoe down to the river-bed, it was to see another range of impassable
+mountains barring the way westward.  All that kept Mackenzie's men from
+turning back was that awful <I>portage</I> of nine miles.  Nothing ahead
+could be worse than what lay behind; so they embarked, following the
+south branch where the river forked.  The stream was swift as a
+cascade.  Half the crew walked to lighten the canoe and prevent grazing
+on the rocky bottoms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once, at dusk, when walkers and paddlers happened to have camped on
+opposite shores, the marchers came dashing across stream, wading
+neck-high, with news that they had heard the firearms of Indian
+raiders.  Fires were put out, muskets loaded, and each man took his
+station at the foot of a tree, where all passed a sleepless night.  No
+hostiles appeared.  The noise was probably falling avalanches.  And
+once when Mackenzie and Mackay had gone ahead with the Indian
+interpreters, they came back to find that the canoe had disappeared.
+In vain they kindled fires, fired guns, set branches adrift on the
+swift current as a signal&mdash;no response came from the <I>voyageurs</I>.  The
+boatmen evidently did not wish to be found.  What Mackenzie's
+suspicions were one may guess.  It would be easier for the crew to
+float back down Peace River than pull against this terrific current
+with more <I>portages</I> over mountains.  The Indians became so alarmed
+that they wanted to build a raft forthwith and float back to Chipewyan.
+The abandoned party had not tasted a bite of food for twenty-four
+hours.  They had not even seen a grouse, and in their powder horns were
+only a few rounds of ammunition.  Separating, Mackenzie and his Indian
+went up-stream, Mackay and his went down-stream, each agreeing to
+signal the other by gunshots if either found the canoe.  Barefooted and
+drenched in a terrific thunderstorm, Mackenzie wandered on till
+darkness shrouded the forest.  He had just lain down on a soaking couch
+of spruce boughs when the ricochetting echo of a gun set the boulders
+crashing down the precipices.  Hurrying down-stream, he found Mackay at
+the canoe.  The crew pretended that a leakage about the keel had caused
+delay; but the canoe did not substantiate the excuse.  Mackenzie said
+nothing; but he never again allowed the crew out of his sight on the
+east side of the mountains.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So far there had been no sign of Indians among the mountains; and now
+the canoe was gliding along calm waters when savages suddenly sprang
+out of a thicket, brandishing spears.  The crew became panic-stricken;
+but Mackenzie stepped fearlessly ashore, offered the hostiles presents,
+shook hands, and made his camp with them.  The savages told him that he
+was nearing a <I>portage</I> across the Divide.  One of them went with
+Mackenzie the next day as guide.  The river narrowed to a small
+tarn&mdash;the source of Peace River; and a short <I>portage</I> over rocky
+ground brought the canoe to a second tarn emptying into a river that,
+to Mackenzie's disappointment, did not flow west, but south.  He had
+crossed the Divide, the first white man to cross the continent in the
+North; but how could he know whether to follow this stream?  It might
+lead east to the Saskatchewan.  As a matter of fact, he was on the
+sources of the Fraser, that winds for countless leagues south through
+the mountains before turning westward for the Pacific.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Full of doubt and misgivings, uncertain whether he had crossed the
+Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river.  Snowy
+peaks were on every side.  Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy
+green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river
+was hemmed in by shadowy ca�ons with roaring cascades that compelled
+frequent <I>portage</I>.  Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to
+lighten the canoe and look out for danger; but fear had got in the
+marrow of his men.  They thought that he was trying to avoid risks to
+which he was exposing them; and they compelled him to embark, vowing,
+if they were to perish, he was to perish with them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To quiet their fears, Mackenzie embarked with them.  Barely had they
+pushed out when the canoe was caught by a sucking undercurrent which
+the paddlers could not stem&mdash;a terrific rip told them that the canoe
+had struck&mdash;the rapids whirled her sideways and away she went
+down-stream&mdash;the men jumped out, but the current carried them to such
+deep water that they were clinging to the gunwales as best they could
+when, with another rip, the stern was torn clean out of the canoe.  The
+blow sent her swirling&mdash;another rock battered the bow out&mdash;the keel
+flattened like a raft held together only by the bars.  Branches hung
+overhead.  The bowman made a frantic grab at these to stop the rush of
+the canoe&mdash;he was hoisted clear from his seat and dropped ashore.
+Mackenzie jumped out up to his waist in ice-water.  The steersman had
+yelled for each to save himself; but Mackenzie shouted out a
+countermand for every man to hold on to the gunwales.  In this fashion
+they were all dragged several hundred yards till a whirl sent the wreck
+into a shallow eddy.  The men got their feet on bottom, and the
+wreckage was hauled ashore.  During the entire crisis the Indians sat
+on top of the canoe, howling with terror.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All the bullets had been lost.  A few were recovered.  Powder was
+spread out to dry; and the men flatly refused to go one foot farther.
+Mackenzie listened to the revolt without a word.  He got their clothes
+dry and their benumbed limbs warmed over a roaring fire.  He fed them
+till their spirits had risen.  Then he quietly remarked that the
+experience would teach them how to run rapids in the future.  Men of
+the North&mdash;to turn back?  Such a thing had never been known in the
+history of the Northwest Fur Company.  It would disgrace them forever.
+Think of the honor of conquering disaster.  Then he vowed that he would
+go ahead, whether the men accompanied him or not.  Then he set them to
+patching the canoe with oil-cloth and bits of bark; but large sheets of
+birch bark are rare in the Rockies; and the patched canoe weighed so
+heavily that the men could scarcely carry it.  It took them fourteen
+hours to make the three-mile <I>portage</I> of these rapids.  The Indian
+from the mountain tribe had lost heart.  Mackenzie and Mackay watched
+him by turns at night; but the fellow got away under cover of darkness,
+the crew conniving at the escape in order to compel Mackenzie to turn
+back.  Finally the river wound into a large stream on the west side of
+the main range of the Rockies.  Mackenzie had crossed the Divide.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a week after crossing the Divide, the canoe followed the course of
+the river southward.  This was not what Mackenzie expected.  He sought
+a stream flowing directly westward, and was keenly alert for sign of
+Indian encampment where he might learn the shortest way to the Western
+Sea.  Once the smoke of a camp-fire rose through the bordering forest;
+but no sooner had Mackenzie's interpreters approached than the savages
+fired volley after volley of arrows and swiftly decamped, leaving no
+trace of a trail.  There was nothing to do but continue down the
+devious course of the uncertain river.  The current was swift and the
+outlook cut off by the towering mountains; but in a bend of the river
+they came on an Indian canoe drawn ashore.  A savage was just emerging
+from a side stream when Mackenzie's men came in view.  With a wild
+whoop, the fellow made off for the woods; and in a trice the narrow
+river was lined with naked warriors, brandishing spears and displaying
+the most outrageous hostility.  When Mackenzie attempted to land,
+arrows hissed past the canoe, which they might have punctured and sunk.
+Determined to learn the way westward from these Indians, Mackenzie
+tried strategy.  He ordered his men to float some distance from the
+savages.  Then he landed alone on the shore opposite the hostiles,
+having sent one of his interpreters by a detour through the woods to
+lie in ambush with fusee ready for instant action.  Throwing aside
+weapons, Mackenzie displayed tempting trinkets.  The warriors
+conferred, hesitated, jumped in the canoes, and came, backing stern
+foremost, toward Mackenzie.  He threw out presents.  They came ashore
+and were presently sitting by his side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From them he learned the river he was following ran for "many moons"
+through the "shining mountains" before it reached the "midday sun."  It
+was barred by fearful rapids; but by retracing the way back up the
+river, the white men could leave the canoe at a carrying place and go
+overland to the salt water in eleven days.  From other tribes down the
+same river, Mackenzie gathered similar facts.  He knew that the stream
+was misleading him; but a retrograde movement up such a current would
+discourage his men.  He had only one month's provisions left.  His
+ammunition had dwindled to one hundred and fifty bullets and thirty
+pounds of shot.  Instead of folding his hands in despondency, Mackenzie
+resolved to set the future at defiance and go on.  From the Indians he
+obtained promise of a man to guide him back.  Then he frankly laid all
+the difficulties before his followers, declaring that he was going on
+alone and they need not continue unless they voluntarily decided to do
+so.  His dogged courage was contagious.  The speech was received with
+huzzas, and the canoe was headed upstream.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Indian guide was to join Mackenzie higher upstream; but the
+reappearance of the white men when they had said they would not be back
+for "many moons" roused the suspicions of the savages.  The shores were
+lined with warriors who would receive no explanation that Mackenzie
+tried to give in sign language.  The canoe began to leak so badly that
+the boatmen had to spend half the time bailing out water; and the
+<I>voyageurs</I> dared not venture ashore for resin.  Along the river cliff
+was a little three-cornered hut of thatched clay.  Here Mackenzie took
+refuge, awaiting the return of the savage who had promised to act as
+guide.  The three walls protected the rear, but the front of the hut
+was exposed to the warriors across the river; and the whites dared not
+kindle a fire that might serve as a target.  Two nights were passed in
+this hazardous shelter, Mackay and Mackenzie alternately lying in their
+cloaks on the wet rocks, keeping watch.  At midnight of the third day's
+siege, a rustling came from the woods to the rear and the boatmen's dog
+set up a furious barking.  The men were so frightened that they three
+times loaded the canoe to desert their leader, but something in the
+fearless confidence of the explorer deterred them.  As daylight sifted
+through the forest, Mackenzie descried a vague object creeping through
+the underbrush.  A less fearless man would have fired and lost all.
+Mackenzie dashed out to find the cause of alarm an old blind man,
+almost in convulsions from fear.  He had been driven from this river
+hut.  Mackenzie quieted his terror with food.  By signs the old man
+explained that the Indians had suspected treachery when the whites
+returned so soon; and by signs Mackenzie requested him to guide the
+canoe back up the river to the carrying place; but the old creature
+went off in such a palsy of fear that he had to be lifted bodily into
+the canoe.  The situation was saved.  The hostiles could not fire
+without wounding one of their own people; and the old man could explain
+the real reason for Mackenzie's return.  Rations had been reduced to
+two meals a day.  The men were still sulking from the perils of the
+siege when the canoe struck a stump that knocked a hole in the keel,
+"which," reports Mackenzie, laconically, "gave them all an opportunity
+to let loose their discontent without reserve."  Camp after camp they
+passed, which the old man's explanations pacified, till they at length
+came to the carrying place.  Here, to the surprise and delight of all,
+the guide awaited them.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-301"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-301.jpg" ALT="Good Hope, Mackenzie River.  Hudson's Bay Company Fort." BORDER="2" WIDTH="397" HEIGHT="301">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Good Hope, Mackenzie River.  Hudson's Bay Company Fort.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+On July 4, provisions were <I>cached</I>, the canoe abandoned, and a start
+made overland westward, each carrying ninety pounds of provisions
+besides musket and pistols.  And this burden was borne on the rations
+of two scant meals a day.  The way was ridgy, steep, and obstructed by
+windfalls.  At cloud-line, the rocks were slippery as glass from
+moisture, and Mackenzie led the way, beating the drip from the branches
+as they marched.  The record was twelve miles the first day.  When it
+rained, the shelter was a piece of oil-cloth held up in an extemporized
+tent, the men crouching to sleep as best they could.  The way was well
+beaten and camp was frequently made for the night with strange Indians,
+from whom fresh guides were hired; but when he did not camp with the
+natives, Mackenzie watched his guide by sleeping with him.  Though the
+fellow was malodorous from fish oil and infested with vermin, Mackenzie
+would spread his cloak in such a way that escape was impossible without
+awakening himself.  No sentry was kept at night.  All hands were too
+deadly tired from the day's climb.  Once, in the impenetrable gloom of
+the midnight forest, Mackenzie was awakened by a plaintive chant in a
+kind of unearthly music.  A tribe was engaged in religious devotions to
+some woodland deity.  Totem poles of cedar, carved with the heads of
+animals emblematic of family clans, told Mackenzie that he was nearing
+the coast tribes.  Barefooted, with ankles swollen and clothes torn to
+shreds, they had crossed the last range of mountains within two weeks
+of leaving the inland river.  They now embarked with some natives for
+the sea.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One can guess how Mackenzie's heart thrilled as they swept down the
+swift river&mdash;six miles an hour&mdash;past fishing weirs and Indian camps,
+till at last, far out between the mountains, he descried the narrow arm
+of the blue, limitless sea.  The canoe leaked like a sieve; but what
+did that matter?  At eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, July 20,
+the river carried them to a wide lagoon, lapped by a tide, with the
+seaweed waving for miles along the shore.  Morning fog still lay on the
+far-billowing ocean.  Sea otters tumbled over the slimy rocks with
+discordant cries.  Gulls darted overhead; and past the canoe dived the
+great floundering grampus.  There was no mistaking.  This was the
+sea&mdash;the Western Sea, that for three hundred years had baffled all
+search overland, and led the world's greatest explorers on a chase of a
+will-o'-the-wisp.  What Cartier and La Salle and La V�rendrye failed to
+do, Mackenzie had accomplished.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Mackenzie's position was not to be envied.  Ten starving men on a
+barbarous coast had exactly twenty pounds of pemmican, fifteen of rice,
+six of flour.  Of ammunition there was scarcely any.  Between home and
+their leaky canoe lay half a continent of wilderness and mountains.
+The next day was spent coasting the cove for a place to take
+observations.  Canoes of savages met the white men, and one impudent
+fellow kept whining out that he had once been shot at by men of
+Mackenzie's color.  Mackenzie took refuge for the night on an isolated
+rock which was barely large enough for his party to gain a foothold.
+The savages hung about pestering the boatmen for gifts.  Two white men
+kept guard, while the rest slept.  On Monday, when Mackenzie was
+setting up his instruments, his young Indian guide came, foaming at the
+mouth from terror, with news that the coast tribes were to attack the
+white men by hurling spears at the unsheltered rock.  The boatmen lost
+their heads and were for instant flight, anywhere, everywhere, in a
+leaky canoe that would have foundered a mile out at sea.  Mackenzie did
+not stir, but ordered fusees primed and the canoe gummed.  Mixing up a
+pot of vermilion, he painted in large letters on the face of the rock
+where they had passed the night:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July,
+one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The canoe was then headed eastward for the homeward trip.  Only once
+was the explorer in great danger on his return.  It was just as the
+canoe was leaving tide-water for the river.  The young Indian guide led
+him full tilt into the village of hostiles that had besieged the rock.
+Mackenzie was alone, his men following with the baggage.  Barely had he
+reached the woods when two savages sprang out, with daggers in hand
+ready to strike.  Quick as a flash, Mackenzie quietly raised his gun.
+They dropped back; but he was surrounded by a horde led by the impudent
+chief of the attack on the rock the first night on the sea.  One
+warrior grasped Mackenzie from behind.  In the scuffle hat and cloak
+came off; but Mackenzie shook himself free, got his sword out, and
+succeeded in holding the shouting rabble at bay till his men came.
+Then such was his rage at the indignity that he ordered his followers
+in line with loaded fusees, marched to the village, demanded the return
+of the hat and cloak, and obtained a peace-offering of fish as well.
+The Indians knew the power of firearms, and fell at his feet in
+contrition.  Mackenzie named this camp Rascal Village.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At another time his men lost heart so completely over the difficulties
+ahead that they threw everything they were carrying into the river.
+Mackenzie patiently sat on a stone till they had recovered from their
+panic.  Then he reasoned and coaxed and dragooned them into the spirit
+of courage that at last brought them safely over mountain and through
+ca�on to Peace River.  On August 24, a sharp bend in the river showed
+them the little home fort which they had left four months before.  The
+joy of the <I>voyageurs</I> fairly exploded.  They beat their paddles on the
+canoe, fired off all the ammunition that remained, waved flags, and set
+the cliffs ringing with shouts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mackenzie spent the following winter at Chipewyan, despondent and
+lonely.  "What a situation, starving and alone!" he writes to his
+cousin.  The hard life was beginning to wear down the dauntless spirit.
+"I spend the greater part of my time in vague speculations.&#8230;  In
+fact my mind was never at ease, nor could I bend it to my wishes.
+Though I am not superstitious, my dreams cause me great annoyance.  I
+scarcely close my eyes without finding myself in company with the dead."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The following winter Mackenzie left the West never to return.  The
+story of his travels was published early in the nineteenth century, and
+he was knighted by the English king.  The remainder of his life was
+spent quietly on an estate in Scotland, where he died in 1820.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-306"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-306.jpg" ALT="The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight Sun.--C. W. Mathers." BORDER="2" WIDTH="406" HEIGHT="274">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light
+<BR>
+of the Midnight Sun.&mdash;C. W. Mathers.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+1803-1806
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LEWIS AND CLARK
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend the
+Columbia to the Pacific&mdash;Exciting Adventures on the Ca�ons of the
+Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone&mdash;Lewis'
+Escape from Hostiles
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The spring of 1904 witnessed the centennial celebration of an area as
+large as half the kingdoms of Europe, that has the unique distinction of
+having transferred its allegiance to three different flags within
+twenty-four hours.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the opening of the nineteenth century Spain had ceded all the region
+vaguely known as Louisiana back to France, and France had sold the
+territory, to the United States; but post-horse and stage of those old
+days travelled slowly.  News of Spain's cession and France's sale reached
+Louisiana almost simultaneously.  On March 9, 1804, the Spanish grandees
+of St. Louis took down their flag and, to the delight of Louisiana, for
+form's sake erected French colors.  On March 10, the French flag was
+lowered for the emblem that has floated over the Great West ever
+since&mdash;the stars and stripes.  How vast was the new territory acquired,
+the eastern states had not the slightest conception.  As early as 1792
+Captain Gray, of the ship <I>Columbia</I>, from Boston, had blundered into the
+harbor of a vast river flowing into the Pacific.  What lay between this
+river and that other great river on the eastern side of the
+mountains&mdash;the Missouri?  Jefferson had arranged with John Ledyard of
+Connecticut, who had been with Captain Cook on the Pacific, to explore
+the northwest coast of America by crossing Russia overland; but Russia
+had similar designs for herself, and stopped Ledyard on the way.  In 1803
+President Jefferson asked Congress for an appropriation to explore the
+Northwest by way of the Missouri.  Now that the wealth of the West is
+beyond the estimate of any figure, it seems almost inconceivable that
+there were people little-minded enough to haggle over the price paid for
+Louisiana&mdash;$15,000,000&mdash;and to object to the appropriation required for
+its exploration&mdash;$2500; but fortunately the world goes ahead in spite of
+hagglers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+May of 1804 saw Captain Meriwether Lewis, formerly secretary to President
+Jefferson, and Captain William Clark of Virginia launch out from Wood
+River opposite St. Louis, where they had kept their men encamped all
+winter on the east side of the Mississippi, waiting until the formal
+transfer of Louisiana for the long journey of exploration to the sources
+of the Missouri and the Columbia.  Their escort consisted of twenty
+soldiers, eleven <I>voyageurs</I>, and nine frontiersmen.  The main craft was
+a keel boat fifty-five feet long, of light draft, with square-rigged sail
+and twenty-two oars, and tow-line fastened to the mast pole to track the
+boat upstream through rapids.  An American flag floated from the prow,
+and behind the flag the universal types of progress everywhere&mdash;goods for
+trade and a swivel-gun.  Horses were led alongshore for hunting, and two
+pirogues&mdash;sharp at prow, broad at stern, like a flat-iron or a
+turtle&mdash;glided to the fore of the keel boat.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-309"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-309.jpg" ALT="Captain Meriwether Lewis." BORDER="2" WIDTH="280" HEIGHT="347">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Captain Meriwether Lewis.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The Missouri was at flood tide, turbid with crumbling clay banks and
+great trees torn out by the roots, from which keel boat and pirogues
+sheered safely off.  For the first time in history the Missouri resounded
+to the Fourth of July guns; and round camp-fire the men danced to the
+strains of a <I>voyageur's</I> fiddle.  Usually, among forty men is one
+traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife;
+but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the
+lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the
+Platte, down the Osage, down the Missouri, with canoe loads of furs for
+St. Louis.  These men foregathered with the <I>voyageurs</I> and told only too
+true stories of the dangers ahead.  Fires kindled on the banks of the
+river called neighboring Indians to council.  Council Bluffs commemorates
+one conference, of which there were many with Iowas and Omahas and
+Ricarees and Sioux.  Pause was made on the south side of the Missouri to
+visit the high mound where Blackbird, chief of the Omahas, was buried
+astride his war horse that his spirit might forever watch the French
+<I>voyageurs</I> passing up and down the river.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-310"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-310.jpg" ALT="Captain William Clark." BORDER="2" WIDTH="296" HEIGHT="358">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Captain William Clark.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+By October the explorers were sixteen hundred miles north of St. Louis,
+at the Mandan villages near where Bismarck stands to-day.  The Mandans
+welcomed the white men; but the neighboring tribes of Ricarees were
+insolent.  "Had I these white warriors on the upper plains," boasted a
+chief to Charles Mackenzie, one of the Northwest Fur Company men from
+Canada, "my young men on horseback would finish them as they would so
+many wolves; for there are only two sensible men among them, the worker
+of iron [blacksmith] and the mender of guns."  Four Canadian traders had
+already been massacred by this chief.  Captain Lewis knew that his
+company must winter on the east side of the mountains, and there were a
+dozen traders&mdash;Hudson Bay and Nor'westers&mdash;on the ground practising all
+the unscrupulous tricks of rivals, Nor'westers driving off Hudson Bay
+horses, Hudson Bay men driving off Nor'-westers', to defeat trade; so
+Captain Lewis at once had a fort constructed.  It was triangular in
+shape, the two converging walls consisting of barracks with a loopholed
+bastion at the apex, the base being a high wall of strong pickets where
+sentry kept constant guard.  Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to
+secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians;
+but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he
+luckily engaged an old Nor'wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife,
+Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.[1] On
+Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan;
+and all that night the men danced hilariously.  On New Years of 1805, the
+white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one <I>voyageur</I> danced "on his
+head" to the uproarious applause of the savages.  All winter the men
+joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican.  In February,
+work was begun on the small boats for the ascent of the Missouri.  By the
+end of March, the river had cleared of ice, and a dozen men were sent
+back to St. Louis.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At five, in the afternoon of April 7, six canoes and two pirogues were
+pushed out on the Missouri.  Sails were hoisted; a cheer from the
+Canadian traders and Indians standing on the shore&mdash;and the boats glided
+up the Missouri with flags flying from foremost prow.  Hitherto Lewis and
+Clark had passed over travelled ground.  Now they had set sail for the
+Unknown.  Within a week they had passed the Little Missouri, the height
+of land that divides the waters of the Missouri from those of the
+Saskatchewan, and the great Yellowstone River, first found by wandering
+French trappers and now for the first time explored.  The current of the
+Missouri grew swifter, the banks steeper, and the use of the tow-line
+more frequent.  The voyage was no more the holiday trip that it had been
+all the way from St. Louis.  Hunters were kept on the banks to forage for
+game, and once four of them came so suddenly on an open-mouthed,
+ferocious old bear that he had turned hunter and they hunted before guns
+could be loaded; and the men saved themselves only by jumping twenty feet
+over the bank into the river.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For miles the boats had to be tracked up-stream by the tow-line.  The
+shore was so steep that it offered no foothold.  Men and stones slithered
+heterogeneously down the sliding gravel into the water.  Moccasins wore
+out faster than they could be sewed; and the men's feet were cut by
+prickly-pear and rock as if by knives.  On Sunday, May 26, when Captain
+Lewis was marching to lighten the canoes, he had just climbed to the
+summit of a high, broken cliff when there burst on his glad eyes a first
+glimpse of the far, white "Shining Mountains" of which the Indians told,
+the Rockies, snowy and dazzling in the morning sun.  One can guess how
+the weather-bronzed, ragged man paused to gaze on the glimmering summits.
+Only one other explorer had ever been so far west in this region&mdash;young
+De la V�rendrye, fifty years before; but the Frenchman had been compelled
+to turn back without crossing the mountains, and the two Americans were
+to assail and conquer what had proved an impassable barrier.  The
+Missouri had become too deep for poles, too swift for paddles; and the
+banks were so precipitous that the men were often poised at dizzy heights
+above the river, dragging the tow-line round the edge of rock and crumbly
+cliff.  Captain Lewis was leading the way one day, crawling along the
+face of a rock wall, when he slipped.  Only a quick thrust of his
+spontoon into the cliff saved him from falling almost a hundred feet.  He
+had just struck it with terrific force into the rock, where it gave him
+firm handhold, when he heard a voice cry, "Good God, Captain, what shall
+I do?"
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-314"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-314.jpg" ALT="Tracking Up-stream." BORDER="2" WIDTH="401" HEIGHT="308">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Tracking Up-stream.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Windsor, a frontiersman, had slipped to the very verge of the rock, where
+he lay face down with right arm and leg completely over the precipice,
+his left hand vainly grabbing empty air for grip of anything that would
+hold him back.  Captain Lewis was horrified, but kept his presence of
+mind; for the man's life hung by a thread.  A move, a turn, the slightest
+start of alarm to disturb Windsor's balance&mdash;and he was lost.  Steadying
+his voice, Captain Lewis shouted back, "You're in little danger.  Stick
+your knife in the cliff to hoist yourself up."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the leverage of the knife, Windsor succeeded in lifting himself back
+to the narrow ledge.  Then taking off his moccasins, he crawled along the
+cliff to broader foothold.  Lewis sent word for the crews to wade the
+margin of the river instead of attempting this pass&mdash;which they did,
+though shore water was breast high and ice cold.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-316"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-316.jpg" ALT="Typical Mountain Trapper." BORDER="2" WIDTH="296" HEIGHT="387">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Typical Mountain Trapper.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The Missouri had now become so narrow that it was hard to tell which was
+the main river and which a tributary; so Captain Lewis and four men went
+in advance to find the true course.  Leaving camp at sunrise, Captain
+Lewis was crossing a high, bare plain, when he heard the most musical of
+all wilderness sounds&mdash;the far rushing that is the voice of many waters.
+Far above the prairie there shimmered in the morning sun a gigantic plume
+of spray.  Surely this was the Great Falls of which the Indians told.
+Lewis and his men broke into a run across the open for seven miles, the
+rush of waters increasing to a deafening roar, the plume of spray to
+clouds of foam.  Cliffs two hundred feet high shut off the view.  Down
+these scrambled Lewis, not daring to look away from his feet till safely
+at bottom, when he faced about to see the river compressed by sheer
+cliffs over which hurled a white cataract in one smooth sheet eighty feet
+high.  The spray tossed up in a thousand bizarre shapes of wind-driven
+clouds.  Captain Lewis drew the long sigh of the thing accomplished.  He
+had found the Great Falls of the Missouri.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-317"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-317.jpg" ALT="The Discovery of the Great Falls." BORDER="2" WIDTH="402" HEIGHT="642">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: The Discovery of the Great Falls.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Seating himself on the rock, he awaited his hunters.  That night they
+camped under a tree near the falls.  Morning showed that the river was
+one succession of falls and rapids for eighteen miles.  Here was indeed a
+stoppage to the progress of the boats.  Sending back word to Captain
+Clark of the discovery of the falls, Lewis had ascended the course of the
+cascades to a high hill when he suddenly encountered a herd of a thousand
+buffalo.  It was near supper-time.  Quick as thought, Lewis fired.  What
+was his amazement to see a huge bear leap from the furze to pounce on the
+wounded quarry; and what was Bruin's amazement to see the unusual
+spectacle of a thing as small as a man marching out to contest possession
+of that quarry?  Man and bear reared up to look at each other.  Bear had
+been master in these regions from time immemorial.  Man or beast&mdash;which
+was to be master now?  Lewis had aimed his weapon to fire again, when he
+recollected that it was not loaded; and the bear was coming on too fast
+for time to recharge.  Captain Lewis was a brave man and a dignified man;
+but the plain was bare of tree or brush, and the only safety was
+inglorious flight.  But if he had to retreat, the captain determined that
+he <I>would</I> retreat only at a walk.  The rip of tearing claws sounded from
+behind, and Lewis looked over his shoulder to see the bear at a hulking
+gallop, open-mouthed,&mdash;and off they went, explorer and exploited, in a
+sprinting match of eighty yards, when the grunting roar of pursuer told
+pursued that the bear was gaining.  Turning short, Lewis plunged into the
+river to mid-waist and faced about with his spontoon at the bear's nose.
+A sudden turn is an old trick with all Indian hunters; the bear
+floundered back on his haunches, reconsidered the sport of hunting this
+new animal, man, and whirled right about for the dead buffalo.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-319"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-319.jpg" ALT="Fighting a Grizzly." BORDER="2" WIDTH="400" HEIGHT="639">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Fighting a Grizzly.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+It took the crews from the 15th to the 25th of June to <I>portage</I> past the
+Great Falls.  Cottonwood trees yielded carriage wheels two feet in
+diameter, and the masts of the pirogues made axletrees.  On these
+wagonettes the canoes were dragged across the <I>portage</I>.  It was hard,
+hot work.  Grizzlies prowled round the camp at night, wakening the
+exhausted workers.  The men actually fell asleep on their feet as they
+toiled, and spent half the night double-soling their torn moccasins, for
+the cactus already had most of the men limping from festered feet.  Yet
+not one word of complaint was uttered; and once, when the men were camped
+on a green along the <I>portage</I>, a <I>voyageur</I> got out his fiddle, and the
+sore feet danced, which was more wholesome than moping or poulticing.
+The boldness of the grizzlies was now explained.  Antelope and buffalo
+were carried over the falls.  The bears prowled below for the carrion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After failure to construct good hide boats, two other craft, twenty-five
+and thirty-three feet long, were knocked together, and the crews launched
+above the rapids for the far Shining Mountains that lured like a
+mariner's beacon.  Night and day, when the sun was hot, came the
+boom-boom as of artillery from the mountains.  The <I>voyageurs</I> thought
+this the explosion of stones, but soon learned to recognize the sound of
+avalanche and land-slide.  The river became narrower, deeper, swifter, as
+the explorers approached the mountains.  For five miles rocks rose on
+each side twelve hundred feet high, sheer as a wall.  Into this shadowy
+ca�on, silent as death, crept the boats of the white men, vainly
+straining their eyes for glimpse of egress from the watery defile.  A
+word, a laugh, the snatch of a <I>voyageur's</I> ditty, came back with elfin
+echo, as if spirits hung above the dizzy heights spying on the intruders.
+Springs and tenuous, wind-blown falls like water threads trickled down
+each side of the lofty rocks.  The water was so deep that poles did not
+touch bottom, and there was not the width of a foot-hold between water
+and wall for camping ground.  Flags were unfurled from the prows of the
+boats to warn marauding Indians on the height above that the <I>voyageurs</I>
+were white men, not enemies.  Darkness fell on the ca�on with the great
+hushed silence of the mountains; and still the boats must go on and on in
+the darkness, for there was no anchorage.  Finally, above a small island
+in the middle of the river, was found a tiny camping ground with
+pine-drift enough for fire-wood.  Here they landed in the pitchy dark.
+They had entered the Gates of the Rockies on the 19th of July.  In the
+morning bighorn and mountain goat were seen scrambling along the ledges
+above the water.  On the 25th the Three Forks of the Missouri were
+reached.  Here the Indian woman, Sacajawea, recognized the ground and
+practically became the guide of the party, advising the two explorers to
+follow the south fork or the Jefferson, as that was the stream which her
+tribe followed when crossing the mountains to the plains.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-320"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-320.jpg" ALT="Packer carrying Goods across Portage." BORDER="2" WIDTH="219" HEIGHT="411">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Packer carrying Goods across Portage.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+It now became absolutely necessary to find mountain Indians who would
+supply horses and guide the white men across the Divide.  In the hope of
+finding the Indian trail, Captain Lewis landed with two men and preceded
+the boats.  He had not gone five miles when to his sheer delight he saw a
+Snake Indian on horseback.  Ordering his men to keep back, he advanced
+within a mile of the horseman and three times spread his blanket on the
+ground as a signal of friendship.  The horseman sat motionless as bronze.
+Captain Lewis went forward, with trinkets held out to tempt a parley, and
+was within a few hundred yards when the savage wheeled and dashed off.
+Lewis' men had disobeyed orders and frightened the fellow by advancing.
+Deeply chagrined, Lewis hoisted an American flag as sign of friendship
+and continued his march.  Tracks of horses were followed across a bog,
+along what was plainly an Indian road, till the sources of the Missouri
+became so narrow that one of the men put a foot on each side and thanked
+God that he had lived to bestride the Missouri.  Stooping, all drank from
+the crystal spring whose waters they had traced for three thousand miles
+from St. Louis.  Following a steep declivity, they were presently
+crossing the course of a stream that flowed west and must lead to some
+branch of the Columbia.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-322"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-322.jpg" ALT="Spying on an Enemy's Fort." BORDER="2" WIDTH="392" HEIGHT="196">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Spying on an Enemy's Fort.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Suddenly, on the cliff in front, Captain Lewis discovered two squaws, an
+Indian, and some dogs.  Unfurling his flag, he advanced.  The Indians
+paused, then dashed for the woods.  Lewis tried to tie some presents
+round the dogs' necks as a peace-offering, but the curs made off after
+their master.  The white men had not proceeded a mile before they came to
+three squaws, who never moved but bowed their heads to the ground for the
+expected blow that would make them captives.  Throwing down weapons,
+Lewis pulled up his sleeve to show that he was white.  Presents allayed
+all fear, and the squaws had led him two miles toward their camp when
+sixty warriors came galloping at full speed with arrows levelled.  The
+squaws rushed forward, vociferating and showing their presents.  Three
+chiefs at once dismounted, and fell on Captain Lewis with such greasy
+embraces of welcome that he was glad to end the ceremony.  Pipes were
+smoked, presents distributed, and the white men conducted to a great
+leathern lodge, where Lewis announced his mission and prepared the
+Indians for the coming of the main force in the boats.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-324"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-324.jpg" ALT="Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies." BORDER="2" WIDTH="405" HEIGHT="315">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The Snakes scarcely knew whether to believe the white man's tale.  The
+Indian camp was short of provisions, and Lewis urged the warriors to come
+back up the trail to meet the advancing boats.  The braves hesitated.
+Cameahwait, the chief, harangued till a dozen warriors mounted their
+horses and set out, Lewis and his men each riding behind an Indian.
+Captain Clark could advance only slowly, and the Indians with Lewis grew
+suspicious as they entered the rocky denies without meeting the
+explorers' party.  Half the Snakes turned back.  Among those that went on
+were three women.  To demonstrate good faith, Lewis again mounted a horse
+behind an Indian, though the bare-back riding over rough ground at a mad
+pace was almost jolting his bones apart.  A spy came back breathless with
+news for the hungry warriors that one of the white hunters had killed a
+deer, and the whole company lashed to a breakneck gallop that nearly
+finished Lewis, who could only cling for dear life to the Indian's waist.
+The poor wretches were so ravenous that they fell on the dead deer and
+devoured it raw.  It was here that Lewis expected the boats.  They were
+not to be seen.  The Indians grew more distrustful.  The chief at once
+put fur collars, after the fashion of Indian dress, round the white men's
+shoulders.  As this was plainly a trick to conceal the whites in case of
+treachery on their part, Lewis at once took off his hat and placed it on
+the chief's head.  Then he hurried the Indians along, lest they should
+lose courage completely.  To his mortification, Captain Clark did not
+appear.  To revive the Indians' courage, the white men then passed their
+guns across to the Snakes, signalling willingness to suffer death if the
+Indians discovered treachery.  That night all the Indians hid in the
+woods but five, who slept on guard round the whites.  If anything had
+stopped Clark's advance, Lewis was lost.  Though neither knew it, Lewis
+and Clark were only four miles apart, Clark, Chaboneau, the guide, and
+Sacajawea, the Indian woman, were walking on the shore early in the
+morning, when the squaw began to dance with signs of the most extravagant
+joy.  Looking ahead, Clark saw one of Lewis' men, disguised as an Indian,
+leading a company of Snake warriors that the squaw had recognized as her
+own people, from whom she had been wrested when a child.  The Indians
+broke into songs of delight, and Sacajawea, dashing through the crowd,
+threw her arms round an Indian woman, sobbing and laughing and exhibiting
+all the hysterical delight of a demented creature.  Sacajawea and the
+woman had been playmates in childhood and had been captured in the same
+war; but the Snake woman had escaped, while Sacajawea became a slave and
+married the French guide.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, Captain Clark was being welcomed by Lewis and the chief,
+Cameahwait.  Sacajawea was called to interpret.  Cameahwait rose to
+speak.  The poor squaw flung herself on him with cries of delight.  In
+the chief of the Snakes she had recognized her brother.  Laced coats,
+medals, flags, and trinkets were presented to the Snakes; but though
+willing enough to act as guides, the Indians discouraged the explorers
+about going on in boats.  The western stream was broken for leagues by
+terrible rapids walled in with impassable precipices.  Boats were
+abandoned and horses bought from the Snakes.  The white men set their
+faces northwestward, the southern trail, usually followed by the Snakes,
+leading too much in the direction of the Spanish settlements.  Game grew
+so scarce that by September the men were without food and a colt was
+killed for meat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By October the company was reduced to a diet of dog; but the last Divide
+had been crossed.  Horses were left with an Indian chief of the
+Flatheads, and the explorers glided down the Clearwater, leading to the
+Columbia, in five canoes and one pilot boat.  Great was the joy in camp
+on November 8, 1805; for the boats had passed the last <I>portage</I> of the
+Columbia.  When heavy fog rose, there burst on the eager gaze of the
+<I>voyageurs</I> the shining expanse of the Pacific.  The shouts of the
+jubilant <I>voyageurs</I> mingled with the roar of ocean breakers.  Like
+Alexander Mackenzie of the far North a decade before, Lewis and Clark had
+reached the long-sought Western Sea.  They had been first up the
+Missouri, first across the middle Rockies, and first down the Columbia to
+the Pacific.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Seven huts, known as Fort Clatsop, were knocked up on the south side of
+the Columbia's harbor for winter quarters; and a wretched winter the
+little fort spent, beleaguered not by hostiles, but by such inclement
+damp that all the men were ill before spring and their very leather suits
+rotted from their backs.  Many a time, coasting the sea, were they
+benighted.  Spreading mats on the sand, they slept in the drenching rain.
+Unused to ocean waters, the inland voyageurs became deadly seasick.
+Once, when all were encamped on the shore, an enormous tidal wave broke
+over the camp with a smashing of log-drift that almost crushed the boats.
+Nez Perces and Flatheads had assisted the white men after the Snake
+guides had turned back.  Clatsops and Chinooks were now their neighbors.
+Christmas and New Year of 1806 were celebrated by a discharge of
+firearms.  No boats chanced to touch at the Columbia during the winter.
+The time was passed laying up store of elk meat and leather; for the
+company was not only starving, but nearly naked.  The Pacific had been
+reached on November 14, 1805.  Fort Clatsop was evacuated on the
+afternoon of March 23, 1806.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The goods left to trade for food and horses when Lewis and Clark departed
+from the coast inland had dwindled to what could have been tied in two
+handkerchiefs; but necessity proved the mother of invention, and the men
+cut the brass buttons from their tattered clothes and vended brass
+trinkets to the Indians.  The medicine-chest was also sacrificed, every
+Indian tribe besieging the two captains for eye-water, fly-blisters, and
+other patent wares.  The poverty of the white man roused the insolence of
+the natives on the return over the mountains.  Rocks were rolled down on
+the boatmen at the worst <I>portages</I> by aggressive Indians; and once, when
+the hungry <I>voyageurs</I> were at a meal of dog meat, an Indian impudently
+flung a live pup straight at Captain Lewis' plate.  In a trice the pup
+was back in the fellow's face; Lewis had seized a weapon; and the
+crestfallen aggressor had taken ignominiously to his heels.  When they
+had crossed the mountains, the forces divided into three parties, two to
+go east by the Yellowstone, one under Lewis by the main Missouri.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Somewhere up the height of land that divides the southern waters of the
+Saskatchewan from the northern waters of the Missouri, the tracks of
+Minnetaree warriors were found.  These were the most murderous raiders of
+the plains.  Over a swell of the prairie Lewis was startled to see a band
+of thirty horses, half of them saddled.  The Indians were plainly on the
+war-path, for no women were in camp; so Lewis took out his flag and
+advanced unfalteringly.  An Indian came forward.  Lewis and the chief
+shook hands, but Lewis now had no presents to pacify hostiles.  Camping
+with the Minnetarees for the night, as if he feared nothing, Lewis
+nevertheless took good care to keep close watch on all movements.  He
+smoked the pipe of peace with them as late as he dared; and when he
+retired to sleep, he had ordered Fields and the other two white men to be
+on guard.  At sunrise the Indians crowded round the fire, where Fields
+had for the moment carelessly laid his rifle.  Simultaneously, the
+warriors dashed at the weapons of the sleeping white men, while other
+Indians made off with the explorers' horses.  With a shout, Fields gave
+the alarm, and pursuing the thieves, grappled with the Indian who had
+stolen his rifle.  In the scuffle the Indian was stabbed to the heart.
+Drewyer succeeded in wresting back his gun, and Lewis dashed out with his
+pistol, shouting for the Indians to leave the horses.  The raiders were
+mounting to go off at full speed.  The white men pursued on foot.  Twelve
+horses fell behind; but just as the Indians dashed for hiding behind a
+cliff, Lewis' strength gave out.  He warned them if they did not stop he
+would shoot.  An Indian turned to fire with one of the stolen weapons,
+and instantly Lewis' pistol rang true.  The fellow rolled to earth
+mortally wounded; but Lewis felt the whiz of a bullet past his own head.
+Having captured more horses than they had lost, the white men at once
+mounted and rode for their lives through river and slough, sixty miles
+without halt; for the Minnetarees would assuredly rally a larger band of
+warriors to their aid.  A pause of an hour to refresh the horses and a
+wilder ride by moonlight put forty more miles between Captain Lewis and
+danger.  At daylight the men were so sore from the mad pace for
+twenty-four hours that they could scarcely stand; but safety depended on
+speed and on they went again till they reached the main Missouri, where
+by singularly good luck some of the other <I>voyageurs</I> had arrived.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-328"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-328.jpg" ALT="On Guard." BORDER="2" WIDTH="624" HEIGHT="412">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: On Guard.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The entire forces were reunited below the Yellowstone on August 12th.
+Traders on the way up the Missouri from St. Louis brought first news of
+the outer world, and the discoverers were not a little amused to learn
+that they had been given up for dead.  At the Mandans, Colter, one of the
+frontiersmen, asked leave to go back to the wilds; and Chaboneau, with
+his dauntless wife, bade the white men farewell.  On September 20th
+settlers on the river bank above St. Louis were surprised to see thirty
+ragged men, with faces bronzed like leather, passing down the river.
+Then some one remembered who these worn <I>voyageurs</I> were, and cheers of
+welcome made the cliffs of the Missouri ring.  On September 23d, at
+midday, the boats drew quietly up to the river front of St.  Louis.
+Lewis and Clark, the greatest pathfinders of the United States, had
+returned from the discovery of a new world as large as half Europe,
+without losing a single man but Sergeant Floyd, who had died from natural
+causes a few months after leaving St. Louis.  What Radisson had begun in
+1659-1660, what De la V�rendrye had attempted when he found the way
+barred by the Rockies&mdash;was completed by Lewis and Clark in 1805.  It was
+the last act in that drama of heroes who carved empire out of wilderness;
+and all alike possessed the same hero-qualities&mdash;courage and endurance
+that were indomitable, the strength that is generated in life-and-death
+grapple with naked primordial reality, and that reckless daring which
+defies life and death.  Those were hero-days; and they produced
+hero-types, who flung themselves against the impossible&mdash;and conquered
+it.  What they conquered we have inherited.  It is the Great Northwest.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-330"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-330.jpg" ALT="Indians of the Up-country or _Pays d'en Haut_." BORDER="2" WIDTH="401" HEIGHT="344">
+<H4>
+[Illustration: Indians of the Up-country or <I>Pays d'en Haut</I>.]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] Mention of this man is to be found in Northwest Company manuscripts,
+lately sold in the Masson collection of documents to the Canadian
+Archives and McGill College Library.  It was also my good fortune&mdash;while
+this book was going to print&mdash;to see the entire family collection of
+Clark's letters, owned by Mrs. Julia Clark Voorhis of New York.  Among
+these letters is one to Chaboneau from Clark.  In spite of the cordial
+relations between the Nor'westers and Lewis and Clark, these fur traders
+cannot conceal their fear that this trip presages the end of the fur
+trade.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+APPENDIX
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+For the very excellent translations of the almost untranslatable
+transcripts taken from the Marine Archives of Paris, and forwarded to
+me by the Canadian Archives, I am indebted to Mr. R. Roy, of the Marine
+Department, Ottawa, the eminent authority on French Canadian
+genealogical matters.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Some of the topics in the Appendices are of such a controversial
+nature&mdash;the whereabouts of the Mascoutins, for instance&mdash;that at my
+request Mr. Roy made the translation absolutely literal no matter how
+incongruous the wording.  To those who say Radisson was not on the
+Missouri I commend Appendix E, where the tribes of the West are
+described.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+APPENDIX A
+</H4>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN TO M. COMPORT� BY M. CHOUART,<BR>
+AT LONDON, THE 29TH APRIL, 1685
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+SIR,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have received the two letters with which you have honored me; I have
+even received one inclosed that I have not given, for reasons that I
+will tell you, God willing, in a few days.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have received your instructions contained in the one and the other,
+as to the way I should act, and I should not have failed to execute all
+that you order me for the service of our Master, if I had been at full
+liberty so to do; you must have no doubt about it, because my
+inclination and my duty agree perfectly well.  All the advantages that
+I am offered did not for a moment cause me to waver, but, in short,
+sir, I could not go to Paris, and I shall be happy to go and meet you
+by the route you travel.  I shall be well pleased to find landed the
+people you state will be there; in case they may have the commission
+you speak of in your two letters, have it accompanied if you please
+with a memorandum of what I shall have to do for the service of our
+Master.  I know of a case whereby I am sufficiently taught that it is
+not safe to undertake too many things, however advantageous they may
+be, nor undertaking too little.  I am convinced, sir, that having
+orders, I will carry them out at the risk of my life, and I flatter
+myself that you do not doubt it.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+There is much likelihood that the men you sent last year are lost.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I should like, sir, to be at the place you desire me to go; be assured
+I will perish, or be there as soon as I possibly can; it is saying
+enough.  I do not answer to the rest of your letter, it is sufficient
+that I am addressing a sensible man, who, knowing my heart, will not
+doubt that I will keep my word with him, as I believe he will do all he
+can for my interests.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I am, with much anxiety to see you, sir, your most humble and most
+obedient servant,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+(signed) CHOUART.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I will leave here only on the 25th of next month.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+APPENDIX B
+</H4>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN BY M. CHOUART TO<BR>
+MRS. DES GROSEILLERS, HIS MOTHER
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+AT LONDON, 11TH APRIL, 1685.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I learn by the letter you have written me, of the 2nd November last,
+that my father has returned from France without obtaining anything at
+that Court, which made you think of leaving Quebec; my sentiment would
+be that you abandon this idea as I am strongly determined to go and be
+by you at the first opportunity I get, which shall be, God willing, as
+soon as I have taken means to that effect when I have returned from the
+North.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I hope to start on this voyage in a month or six weeks at the latest; I
+cannot determine on what date I could be near you; my father may know
+what difficulties there are.  However, I hope to surmount them, and
+there is nothing I would not do to that end.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The money I left with my cousin is intended to buy you a house, as I
+have had always in mind to do, had not my father opposed it, but now I
+will do it so as to give you a chance to get on, and always see you in
+the country where I will live.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have been made, here, proposals of marriage, to which I have not
+listened, not being here under the rule of my king nor near my parents,
+and I would have left this kingdom had I been given the liberty to do
+so, but they hold back on me my pay and the price of my merchandise,
+and I cannot sail away as orders have been given to arrest me in case I
+should prepare to leave.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+What you fear in reference to my money should not give you any
+uneasiness on account of the English.  I will cause it to be pretty
+well known that I never intended to follow the English.  I have been
+surprised and forced by my uncle's subterfuges to risk this voyage
+being unable to escape the English vessels where my uncle made me go
+without disclosing his plan, which he has worked out in bringing me
+here, but I will not disclose mine either: to abandon this nation.  I
+am willing that my cousin should pay you the income on my money, until
+I return home.  M. the earl of Denonville, your governor, will see to
+my mother's affairs, as they who render service to the country will not
+be forsaken as in the past, and being generous as he is, loyal and
+zealous for his country, he will inform the Court what there is to be
+done for the benefit of our nation.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I am, my dear mother, to my father and to you,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+most obedient servant,<BR>
+(signed) CHOUART.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+And below is written:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+MOTHER,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I pray you to see on my behalf M. du Lude, and assure him of my very
+humble services.  I will have the honor of seeing him as soon as I can.
+Please do the same with M. Peray and all our good friends.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+APPENDIX C
+</H4>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+COUNCIL
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, 8th June, 1704.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+By the indians Kiskacous, Ottawa, Sinagot of the Sable Nation, Hurons,
+Saulteurs (Sault Indians), Amikoique (Amikou�s), Mississaugas,
+Nipissings, Miamis and Wolves, in the presence of M. de
+Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a
+detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at
+the said post; Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the
+Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as
+<I>voyageurs</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The one named FORTY SOLS, (40 half-penny), indian chief of the Huron
+nation speaks as much on behalf of the said nation as of all those
+present at the meeting.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The French having come, he said:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We ask that all the French be present at this Council so that they
+hear and know what we will say to you.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We are well on this land, it is very good, and we are much pleased
+with it; listen well, father, we pray you.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"Mrs de Tonty went away last year; she did not return; we see you going
+away to-day, father, with your wife, your children and all the
+Frenchwomen as well as that of M. Radisson, who is going down with you;
+that reveals to us that you abandon us.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We are angry for good and ill-disposed if the women go away.  We pray
+you to pay attention to this because we could not stop you nor your
+young men: we demand that Radisson remains, or at least, that he
+returns promptly."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+BY A NECKLACE (Wampum)
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We will escort your wife and the other Frenchwomen who intend to go
+down to Montreal.  Now, mind well what we are asking you.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We readily see that the Governor is a liar, as he does not keep to
+what he has promised us; as he has lied to us we will lie to him also,
+and we will listen no more to his word.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"What brings that man here (speaking of M. Desnoyers)?  We do not know
+him and do not understand him; we are ill-disposed.  It is two years
+since you have been gathering in our peltries, part of which has been
+taken down; we will allow nothing to leave until the French come up
+with goods."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+BY ANOTHER NECKLACE
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"Father, we pray you to send back that man (speaking of M. Desnoyers),
+because if he remains here, we do not answer for his safety; our people
+have told us that he despises our peltries and only wanted beaver;
+where does he want us to get it.  We absolutely want him to go; nothing
+will leave the house where the trading is done and where the peltries
+and bundles are, until the French arrive here with merchandise and they
+be allowed to trade.  When we came here, the Governor did not tell us
+that the merchants would be masters over the merchandise; he lied to
+us; we ask that all the Frenchmen trade here; we pray you to write and
+tell him what we are saying, and if he does not listen to us, we will
+also refuse to accept his word.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"The land is not yours, it is ours, and we will leave it to go where we
+like without anybody finding fault.  We regret having allowed the
+surgeon to leave as we apprehend he will not come back.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We pray you will cause to remain Gauvereau the blacksmith and gunsmith.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"I have nothing more to say, I have spoken for all the nations here
+present."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. de Lamothe had a question put to the Ottawa and the other nations,
+if that was their sentiment; they all answered: Yes, and that they were
+of one and the same mind.  He told them that, seeing they had taken
+time to think over what they had just said, he would consider as to
+what he had to answer them, and, put them off to the morrow, after
+having accepted their necklace.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+(Not signed.)
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+COUNCIL
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, the 9th June, 1704.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+By the Indians Kiskacous; Ottawas; Sinagotres, the Sable nation;
+Hurons; Sauteux (Sault Ste Marie Indians); Amikoique (Beaver nation);
+Mississaugas; Miamis and Wolves in the presence of M. de
+Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a
+detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at
+the said post, Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the
+Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as
+<I>voyageurs</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. de Lamothe addressed all the said nations:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"As you requested me to pay attention to your words, please listen, the
+same, to-day.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"I was aware that Mdme. de Tonty's trip to Montreal last year had given
+you umbrage, because she did not come back; and the cause of it is her
+pregnancy.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"I knew also that my wife's setting out for Montreal as also the other
+Frenchwomen was causing you uneasiness, because you believed I was
+going to abandon you.  It is true she was going away, but it was not
+for ever.  I showed her your necklace; that her children would miss her
+very much and that they begged of her to stay.  When she heard of your
+grief, she accepted your necklace and she will stay for some time,
+because she does not like to refuse her children; the other Frenchwomen
+will remain also.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"You spoke ill of the Governor when you said he was a liar.  If anyone
+told you that he was forsaking you, I will be pleased if you will tell
+me who it is.  As for me I have no knowledge of it.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"M. Desnoyers was present when you offered your necklace, and like me
+he heard your statement.  He told me you were wrong to complain about
+him because he would not take your peltries and that he wanted beaver
+only; you are complaining inopportunely seeing that he has not done any
+trading.  You should tell me who made those reports.  But as you are
+not glad to see him, he has decided to go back, and as I am going down
+to Montreal on good business, he will accompany me, and also M.
+Radisson, because the Governor wants him, and he must obey, and we will
+arrange so that we come back together.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"You have asked me to write down your speech to the Governor.  I will
+be the bearer of it.  I have not the authority to have the French to
+trade here; it is a matter that M. the Governor will settle with M. the
+Intendant.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"The Governor did not lie to you because he did not notify you the
+first year, that the merchants would be masters of the merchandise,
+because it was the King who sent it here then and I could dispose of
+it; since then, an order came from the King in favor of the merchants.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"This land is mine, because I am the first one who lighted a fire
+thereon, and you all took some to light yours.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"I am very glad that you like this land, and that you find it is good.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"It is of no consequence that the surgeon left, because when one goes
+another comes, and the same applies for the gunsmith.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"I have no more to tell you.  Here is some tobacco that you may all
+smoke together, and that it may give you wisdom until I return and the
+Governor sends you his word.  Attend to your mother during my absence,
+and see that she does not want for provisions, for if you do not take
+care of her, on my return I will not give you a drink of brandy.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"M. de Tonty replaces me; I pray you to be on good terms with him."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+FORTY SOLS, chief of the Hurons, spoke for all the indians:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We remember well, father, of what we said yesterday because you repeat
+it to-day.  We thank you for having listened to us and granted all we
+asked you.  We thank the women for not going away, because their
+remaining is as if you remained.  From to-morrow we will stimulate our
+young men to go after provisions for our mother.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"It is three years ago, when in Montreal at the general meeting our
+chiefs died, the governor told us to have courage, that he was sorry
+for us, that he saw we were very far to come and get goods in Montreal,
+and he invited us to come and settle around you, and that he would send
+us merchandise at the same price as in Montreal.  This worked well for
+two years, but goods rose up too much in price the third year.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"The first year you came, we were very happy, but now we are naked, not
+even having a bad shirt to put on our back.  We would be pleased by the
+establishment of several stores here, because if we were refused in
+one, we could go to another.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We are very glad of M. Desnoyers' going back because we do not know
+him and we fear some of our young men may be ill-disposed.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"We were under the impression the Governor had sold us to the merchants
+since they are the masters of the commerce.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"It is true that we took of your fire to light ours but we have waited
+two years without anything coming this way so that your land is ours.
+I told the same thing to the Governor last year in Montreal.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+"Have courage, father, we will pray God for you during your voyage so
+that you may bring back good news."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+(Not signed.)
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+APPENDIX D
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+Cie des Indes
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+(Indies Co'y)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+Renders account to the said company of the death of Mr. Radisson,
+receiver at Montreal, of the nomination ad interim of Mr. Gamelin to
+fill the vacancy of receiver, of account to render by Mr. Deplessis,
+heir of Mr. Radisson to re�stablish price of summer beaver as before
+ordinance of the 4th January, 1733.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+AT QUEBEC, THE 25TH OCTOBER, 1735.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+GENTLEMEN,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have received the letter you did me the honor to send me of the 9th
+March last.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. Radisson, your receiver at Montreal, died there the 14th of June and
+immediately M. Gamelin, merchant, to whom Messrs La Gorgendi�re and
+Daine had given three years ago, had commissioned to look after your
+interests in default or in case of death of M. Radisson, applied to M.
+Michel, my sub-delegate to affix the seals on of all your effects,
+which was done according to the account rendered you by Messrs. La
+Gorgendi�re and Daine.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It was necessary to fill the vacancy.  I have appointed temporarily in
+virtue of the authority, you gave, gentlemen, the same M. Gamelin; I
+thought I could not have your interests in better hands, as much for
+his honesty than his intelligence in regulating his sales and his
+receipts.  Independently of the knowledge he has of the different
+qualities of beaver, I have had the honor to speak to you on this
+subject in my preceding letters and to say that the only obstacle I
+find to giving him the office of receiver at Montreal was his quality
+of merchant outfitter for the upper country, which might render him
+suspicious to you because of the returns he gets in beaver.  Although I
+have a pretty good opinion of him to believe his loyalty proof against
+any particular interest, you shall see, gentlemen, by the copy of the
+commission I have given him, which is sent you, that it is on condition
+either directly or indirectly to do no traffic in the upper country,
+and to confine himself either to marine trade or other inland commerce,
+to which he has agreed, but nevertheless has represented to me that
+being engaged as a partner with M. Lamarque, another merchant, for the
+working out of the post named "the Western Sea" and that of the Sioux;
+this partnership only terminating in 1737; that he was looking around
+to sell his share, but, if this thing was impossible requesting me to
+kindly allow him to continue until that term, past which he would cease
+all commerce in the upper country.  I agreed to this arrangement on
+account of his good qualities, and this will not turn to any account of
+consequence; whatever, selection you may make, gentlemen, you will not
+find a better one in this country.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. de La Gorgendi�re having offered me his son to act as clerk to M.
+Gamelin and comptroller in the Montreal office, for the auditing to be
+made, without increasing on that score the expenditure of your
+administration, I have consented on these conditions; M. Gamelin to
+give him 800 livres (shillings) on the commission of one per cent the
+company allow the receiver at Montreal, and M. Daine has assured me he
+was satisfied with his work.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I will not entertain, you, messieurs, with the discussion of the
+account to be rendered by M. Duplessis, M. Radisson's heir, to your
+agent, who claims he owes 5 to 6000 livres.  Those discussions did not
+take place in my presence.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Most of the beaver shipped this year were put up in bundles, and
+shortage in cotton cloth for packing prevented shipment of the whole.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The disturbances which have occurred for some years in the upper
+country have effectively prevented the Indians from hunting; the post
+of the Bay which abounds ordinarily with beaver, produced nothing;
+those of Detroit and Michilimakinac, only furnished very little.
+Happily the post of the Sioux and of the Western Sea produced near to
+100,000 which swelled up the receipt; otherwise it would have been very
+middling.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The party commanded by M. Desnoyelles against the Indians Sakis and
+Foxes was not as successful as expected on account of the desertion and
+retreat of 100 Hurons and Iroquois who left him when at the Kakanons
+(Kiskanons of Michilimakinac?) without his being able to hold them, so
+that this officer found himself after a long tramp at those Indians'
+fort, not only inferior in numbers but also much in want of provisions.
+He was under the necessity of returning after a rather sharp skirmish
+which took place between some of his men and the enemy.  We lost two
+Frenchmen and one of our indians; the Foxes and Sakis lost 21 men,
+either killed, wounded or captured.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+If the Sakis come back to the Bay, as they pledged themselves to M.
+Desnoyelles we are in hopes here that peace will again flourish and
+consequently the trade of the upper country.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have seen, gentlemen, what you were pleased to say as to reduction in
+price on the summer-beaver.  I had been assured by reliable persons
+that this reduction might become very injurious to your commerce.  I
+have learned that some of this kind of beaver were carried to the
+English who pay two livres (shillings) for one and at a higher price
+than you pay over your counters.  It was from what you wrote me in
+1732, that the hatters could make no use of that beaver, that at your
+request I published an ordinance of the 4th January, 1733, reducing the
+price of summer-beaver either green (gras) or dry (sec) to ten pence a
+pound, on condition that it should be burned.  There could be nothing
+suspicious in that.  But since you now deem that that reduction may be
+harmful, as I have also had in mind to invite the indians and even the
+French under this pretence to take the good as well as the bad beaver
+to the English; I will restore the price of the summer-beaver as it was
+before my ordinance.  I will not be at a loss for a cause: it is not in
+your interest to give a lower price.  You run your commerce, gentlemen,
+with too much good faith to give rise to suspicion that you wished for
+a reduction in price to 10 pence for this kind of beaver, and having it
+burned only to procure it yourself at that price and not burn it.
+Besides, the quantity received is too small a matter to deserve
+consideration.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+[Sidenote: Beaver hats half worked made in the country.]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. the marquis de Beauharnois and I have received the orders of the
+King with reference to beaver hats half worked made in Canada.  His
+Majesty has ordered us to break up the workmen's benches and to prevent
+any manufacture of hats.  We have made some representations on this
+subject, to those made to us, namely by a man named &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, hatter, and
+your receiver at Quebec.  It is true that the making of beaver hats
+half worked and other for export to France could turn out of
+consequence in ruining your privilege and the hat establishments in
+France.  These are the only inconveniences, to my mind, to be feared,
+as I do not look upon such, the making of hats for the use of residents
+of the country.  So that we have satisfied ourselves, until further
+orders, to forbid the going, out of the colony, of all kind of hats, as
+you will see by the ordinance we have published together, M. the
+General and I.  If we had been more strict, the three hatters
+established in this colony, who know no other business than their
+trade, the man &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; amongst others, who follow that calling from
+father to son, would have been reduced to begging.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The quantity of hats they will manufacture when export is stopped,
+cannot be of any injury to the manufactures of the kingdom and be but
+of small matter to your commerce.  Moreover, I am aware that these
+hatters employ the worst kind of beaver, which they get very cheap, and
+your stores at Paris are that much rid of them.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+[Sidenote: Defects in list of cloth sent.]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The cloths you sent this year are of better quality than the precedding
+shipment.  Messrs La Gorgendiere, Daine and Gamelin have observed on
+defects which happen in the lists; they told me they would inform you.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+[Sidenote: Remittance of 300 livres (shillings) to the Baron de
+Longueuil.]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have the honor to thank you, gentlemen, for the remittance of 300
+livres you were pleased to grant to M. the Baron of Longueuil, on my
+recommendation.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It is very difficult to prevent the Indians going to Chouaguen; the
+brandy that the English give out freely is an invincible attraction.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have heard, the same as you, that some Frenchmen disguised as Indians
+had been there; if I can discover some one, you may be sure that I will
+deal promptly with them.  You may have heard that the man LENOIR,
+resident of Montreal, having gone to England three years ago without
+leave, I have kept him in prison till he had settled the fine he was
+condemned to pay, and which I transferred to the hospitals.  I add that
+a part of the interest you have in the Indians not going to Chouaguen,
+I have another on account of the trading carried on for the benefit of
+the King at Niagara and at fort Frontenac which that English post has
+ruined.  By all means you may rely on my attention to break up English
+trade.  I fear I may not succeed in this so long as the brandy traffic,
+although moderate, will find adversaries among those who govern
+consciences.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+[Sidenote: Foreign trade; Beaver at trade at Labrador.]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I will do my best to prevent the beaver which is traded at Labrador and
+the other posts in the lower part of the River to be smuggled to France
+by ships from Bayonne, St Malo and Marseille.  This will be difficult
+as we cannot have at those posts any inspector.  I will try, however,
+to give an ordinance so as to prevent that, which may intimidate some
+of those who carry on that commerce.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It is true that the commandants of the upper country posts have relaxed
+in the sending of the declarations made or to be made by the
+<I>voyageurs</I> as to the quantity and quality of the bundles of beaver
+they take down to Montreal.  M. the General and I have renewed the
+necessary orders on this subject so that the commandants shall conform
+to them.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+[Sidenote: Asks for continuation of gratuity received by Mr. Michel,
+even to increase it.]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. Michel, my subdelegate at Montreal has received the bounty of 500
+livres you have requested your agent to pay to him; he hopes that you
+will be pleased to have it continued next year.  I have the honor to
+pray you to do so, and even augment it, if possible.  I can assure you,
+gentlemen that he lends himself on all occasions to all that may
+concern your commerce.  As for myself, I am very flattered by the
+opinion you entertain that I have at heart your interests.  I always
+feel a true satisfaction in renewing you these assurances.
+<BR><BR>
+I am, respectfully,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+[Sidenote: Thanks for the coffee sent.]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+GENTLEMEN, M. de La Gorgendi�re has delivered to me on your behalf, a
+bale of Moka coffee.  I am very sensible, gentlemen, to this token of
+friendship on your part.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have the honor to thank you, and to assure you that I am very truly
+and respectfully, etc.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+(signed) HOCQUART.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+APPENDIX E
+</H4>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+MEMORANDUM RE CANADA
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+(No locality) 1697
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+All the discoveries in America were only made step by step and little
+by little, especially those of lands held by the French in that part of
+the North.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It being certain that during the reign of king Francis I, several of
+his subjects, amateurs of shipping and of discoveries, in imitation of
+the Portuguese and the Spaniards, made the voyage, where they found the
+great cod bank.  The quality of birds frequenting this sea where they
+always find food, caused them to heave the lead, and bottom was found
+and the said great bank.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+He got an opinion on the nearest lands, and other curious persons
+desired to go farther, and discovered Cape Breton, Virginia and
+Florida.  Some even inhabited and took possession of the divers places,
+abandoned since, through misunderstanding of the commanders and their
+poor skill in knowing how to keep on good terms with the indians of
+those countries, who, good natured all at the beginning, could not
+suffer the rigor with which it was wanted to subjugate them, so that
+after a short occupation, they left to return to Europe.  And since,
+the Spaniards and the English successfully have taken possession of the
+land and all the coasts that the said English have kept until this day
+to much advantage, so that Frenchmen who have returned since have been
+obliged to settle at Cape Breton and Acadia.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+About the year 1540, the said Cape Breton was fortified by Jacques
+Carrier, captain of St Malo, who afterward entered the river St.
+Lawrence up to 7 or 8 leagues above Quebec, where desiring to know
+more, the season also being too far advanced he stopped off to winter
+at a small river which bears his name and which forms the boundary of
+M. de Becancourt's land whom he knew; he made sociable a number of
+Indians who came aboard his ship and brought back beaver pretty
+abundantly.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Since, he made another voyage with Saintonge men which did not prevent
+several other ships to go after the said beaver; men from Dieppe,
+Brittany and La Rochelle, some with a passport and others by fraud and
+piracy, especially the latter, the Civil war having carried away
+persons out of dutifulness, the Admiralty and the Marine being then
+held in very little consideration, which lasted a long time.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+However, I believe for having heard it said, that the lands after new
+discoveries were given since to M. Chabot or to M. Ventadour, where a
+certain gentleman from Saintonge named M. du Champlain, had very free
+admittance and who may have mingled with those of his country who had
+navigated with Carrier and had given him a longing to see that of which
+he had only heard speak.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+He was a proper man for such a scheme; a great courage, wisdom,
+sensible, pious, fair and of great experience; a robust body which
+would render him indefatigable and capable to resist hunger, cold and
+heat.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+This gentleman then solicited permission to come to Canada and obtained
+it.  His small estate and his friends supplied him with a medium sized
+vessel for the passage.  This new commandant or governor pitied much
+the Indians and had the satisfaction at his arrival to see that he was
+much feared and loved by them.  He took memoranda through his
+interpreter of their wars, their mode of living and of their interests.
+At that time they were numerous and proud of the great advantages they
+had over the Iroquois, their enemy.  With this information he recrossed
+to France; gave an account of his voyage, and was so charmed with the
+land, the climate and of the good which would result from a permanent
+establishment that he persuaded his wife to accompany him.  His example
+induced missionaries of St. Fran�ois and some parisian families to
+follow him.  He was granted a commission or governor's provisions to
+take his living from the country.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+He erected a palissade fort at the place now occupied by the fort St
+Louis of Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+To please the indians he went with them and three Frenchmen only,
+warring in the Iroquois country, which has no doubt given rise to our
+quarrel with this nation.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Commerce was then in the hands of the Rochelois (?) who supplied
+some provisions to the said M. de Champlain, a man without interest and
+disposed to be content with little.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+He returns to France in the interests of the country and took back
+Madam his wife who died in a Ursuline convent, at Saintes, I believe,
+and he at Quebec, after having worked hard there, with little help
+because of the misfortunes of France.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. the Cardinal of Richelieu have inspired France with confidence by
+the humiliation of the Rochelois (?) wanted to take care of the marine
+and formed at that time, about 1626 or 1627 what was then called the
+"Society of One Hundred," in which joined persons of all
+qualifications, and also merchants from Dieppe and Rouen.  Dieppe was
+then reputed for good navigators and for navigation.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The said M. the Cardinal got granted to the said company the islands of
+St Christophe, newly discovered and all the lands of Canada.  The
+Company composed of divers states did not take long to disjoin, and of
+this great Company several were formed by themselves, the ones
+concerning themselves about the Isles and the others about Canada,
+where they were also divided up in a Company of Miscou, which is an
+island of the Bay in the lower part of the River, where all the Indians
+meet, and a Company of Tadoussac or Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Basques, Rochelois, Bretons, and Normans, who during the disorders
+of the war had commenced secretly on the River, crossed their commerce
+much by the continuation of their runs without passport.  Sometimes on
+pretext of cod or whale fishing, notwithstanding the interdiction of
+decrees, the gain made them risk everything, as the two sides of the
+river were all settled and many more came down from inland.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Those Companies for being badly served on account of inexperience and
+through poor economy, as will happen at the beginning of all affairs,
+were put to large expenses.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The English had already seized on Boston abandoned by the French after
+their new discovery; beaver and elk peltry were much sought after and
+at a very high price in Europe; they could be had for a needle, a
+hawk-bell or a tin looking-glass, a marked copper coin.  Our possession
+was there very well-off.  The English who made war to us in France,
+also made it in Canada, and began to take the fleet about Isle Perc�e,
+as it was ascending to Quebec.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+As four or five vessels came every year loaded with goods for the
+Indians, it was at that time quantity of peas, plums, raisins, figs and
+others and provisions for M. de Champlain; a garrison of 15 or 20 men;
+a store in the lower town where the clerks of the Company lived with 10
+or 12 families already used to the country.  This succor failing, much
+hardship was endured in a country which then produced nothing by
+itself, so that the English presenting themselves the next year with
+their fleet, surrender was obligatory; the governor and the Recollets
+crossed over to France and the families were treated honestly enough.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Happily in 1628 or 1629, France made it up with England and the treaty
+gave back Canada to the French, when M. de Champlain, returned and died
+some years later.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Those of the Company of 100, who were persons of dignity and
+consideration, living in Paris, thought fit to leave the care and
+benefits of commerce for Canada with the Rouen and Dieppe merchants,
+with whom joined a few from Paris.  They were charged with the payment
+of the governor's appointments, to furnish him with provisions and
+subsistence and to keep up the garrisons of Quebec and Three-Rivers
+where there was also a post on account of the large number of Indians
+calling; to furnish the things necessary for the war; to pay themselves
+off the product and give account of the surplus to the directors of the
+Company who had an office at Paris.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It has been said that Dieppe and Rouen benefitted and that Paris
+suffered and was disgusted.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+To M. de Champlain succeeded M. de Montmagny, very wise and very
+dignified; knight of Malta; relative of M. de Poinsy, who commanded at
+the Island of St Christophe where the said M. de Montmagny died after
+leaving Canada after a sojourn of 14 or 15 years, loved and cherished
+by the French and the natives&mdash;we say the French, although the
+complaints made against him by the principals were the cause of his
+sorrow and he resigned voluntarily.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It is to be remarked that all the commerce was done at Rouen to go out
+through Dieppe on the hearsay and the fine connections that the Jesuit
+Fathers who had taken the Recollets' place, took great care to have
+printed and distributed every year.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Canada was in vogue and several families from Normandy and the Perche
+took sail to come and reside in it; there were nobles, the most of them
+poor, we might say, who found out from the first, that M. de Montmagny
+was too disinterested to be willing to consider the change they desired
+for their advantage.  They intrigued against him five or six families
+without the participation of the others, got leave from him to go to
+France to ask for favors and there had one of themselves as governor;
+obtained liberty in the beaver trade, which until then had been
+strictly forbidden to the inhabitants who had been reserved the fruits
+of the country to advance the culture of the land such as pease, Indian
+corn, and wheat bread.  That was the first title of the inhabitants to
+trade with the indians.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+To arrive at that end they promised to pay annually 1000 beaver to the
+Paris office for its seignorial right which it did not receive through
+its attention and management of its affairs.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+They got permission to form a Board from their principal men, to
+transact with the governor all matters in the country for peace, for
+war, the settlement of accounts of their society or little republic,
+and also sitting on cases concerning interests of private individuals.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It was then that to keep up this sham republic or society, a tax of
+one-fourth was imposed on the export of beaver.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+By these means the authority of the Company and its store were ruined
+and the whole was turning to the advantage of those four or six
+families, the others, either poor or slighted by the authority of M.
+D'Ailleboust, their governor.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+On this footing it was not hard for them to find large credit at La
+Rochelle, because loans were made in the name of the Community,
+although it consisted only of these four or six families; which from
+their being poor found themselves in large managements enlarged their
+household, ran into expense, that of their vessels and shipments was
+excessive and the wealth derived from the beaver was to pay all.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Their bad management altered their credit and brought them to agree,
+after several years' enjoyment so as not to pay La Rochelle, to take
+their ships to H�vre-de-Grace, where, on arrival they sold to Messrs
+Lick and Tabac; this perfidy which they excused because of the large
+interest taken from them, alarmed La Rochelle who complained to Paris,
+and after much pressing a trustee was appointed to give bonds in the
+name of the society for large sums yet due to the city of La Rochelle.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Their vessels all bore off to Normandy; they took on their cargoes
+there in part, and part at La Rochelle, the trade having been allowed
+those two places, because Rouen and Dieppe had several persons on the
+roll of the Company and obligation was due La Rochelle for having
+loaned property.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The governor and the families addressed reproaches to each other, and
+the King being pleased to listen to them, had the kindness to appoint
+from the body of the company persons of first dignity to give attention
+to what was going on in this colony, who were called Commissioners;
+they were Messrs de Morangis, de la Marguerid, Verthamont and Chame,
+and since, Messrs de Lamoignon, de Boucherat and de Lauzon, the latter
+also of the body of the Company offered to pass over to this country to
+arrange the difficulties, and he asked for its government, which was
+accorded him.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+He embarked at La Rochelle because of the obligation of the creditors
+of that city to treat him gently; Rouen did not care much.  He was a
+literary man; he made friends with the R. F. Jesuits, and created a new
+council in virtue of the powers he had brought, rebuke the one and the
+other place, even the inhabitants, in forbidding them to barter in what
+was called the limits of Tadoussac, which he bounded for a particular
+lease as a security for his payment and of what has always since been
+called the offices of the country or the state of the 33,000 livres;
+the emoluments of the Councillors, the garrison, the Jesuits, the
+Parish, the Ursulines, the Hote-Dieu, etc.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The pretext given was that the Iroquois having burned and ruined the
+Hurons or Ottawa, the tax of one-fourth did not produce enough to meet
+those demands, and because Tadoussac also was not sufficient to meet
+all the expenditure contemplated to give war to the Iroquois, he it was
+also who began in not paying the thousand weight in beaver owing for
+seignorial right to the Company who was irritated and blamed his
+conduct, and after the lapse of some years his friends write him they
+could not longer shield him he anticipated his recall in returning to
+France, where he has since served as sub-dean of the Council, residing
+at the cloister of Notre-Dame with his son, canon at the said church.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I only saw him two years in Canada where he was hardly liked, by reason
+of the little care he took to keep up his rank, without servant, living
+on pork and peas like an artisan or a peasant.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+However, having decided to go back, for a second time he threw open the
+Tadoussac trade, by an order of his Council.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. de Lamoignon, the first president, got named to replace him, M.
+D'Argenson, young man of 30 to 32 years steady as could be, who
+remained four or five years to the satisfaction of everybody; he kept
+up the Council as it is intended for the security of his emoluments and
+of the garrison, selected twelve of the most notable persons to whom he
+gave the faculty of trading at Tadoussac and all the sureties to be
+wished for the administration and maintenance.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+He had the misfortune to fall out with the Jesuit Fathers, and they,
+with messieurs de Mont Royal, of St Sulpice who had sent Mr the abbey
+de Queysac, in the hope of making a bishop of him; the former wishing
+to have one of their nomination presented to the Queen-mother of the
+reigning King, whom God preserve, M. de Laval, to-day elder and first
+bishop, who, very rigid, not only backed the Jesuits against the
+governor in all difficulties but specially in the matter of the liquor
+traffic with the indians.  Although (D'Argenson) a much God-fearing-man
+he had his private opinions, and this offended him; he asked M. de
+Lamoignon for his recall, which was done in 1661, when M. d'Avaugour
+came out.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It was in 1660 that the Office in Paris, at the request of the
+governor, of the Local council and on the advice of Messrs de
+Lamoignon, Chame and other commissioners made an agreement with the
+Rouen merchants to supply the inhabitants with all goods they would
+require with 60% profit on dry goods and 100% on liquors, freight paid.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It was pretended that the country was not safely secured by ships of
+private parties, and that when they arrived alone by unforeseen
+accidents, they happened unexpectedly, to the ruin of the country; as
+well as the beaver fallen to a low price and which was restored only at
+the marriage of the king should keep up.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The creditors then pressing payment of their claims, a decree ordered
+that of the 60%, 10% should be taken for the payment of debts which
+were fixed at 10,000 livres at the rate of the consumption of the time
+and of which the Company of Normandy took charge.  The country was
+favorable enough to this treaty because they were well served, but when
+the treaty arrived at first, the bishop who was jealous because he had
+not been consulted and that some little gratification had been given to
+facilitate matters had it opposed by some of the inhabitants and by M.
+D'Avaugour, governor in the place of the said D'Argenson.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Society of Normandy consented to the breaking off of the treaty on
+receiving a minute account and being paid some compensation, as to
+which they had no satisfaction because of the changes, for M.
+D'Avaugour, like the others, fell out with the Bishop who went to
+France and had him revoked, presenting in his stead M. de Mezy, a
+Norman gentleman who did nothing better than to overdo all the
+difficulties arising on the question of the Bishop and the Governor's
+powers.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The beaver dropped down, as soon, to a low price, and there was a
+difference by half when the King in 1664 formed the Company of the West
+Indies, which alone, to the exclusion of all others, had to supply the
+country with merchandise and receive also all the beaver; in 1669, came
+M. de Tracy, de Courcelles and Talon; the latter did not want any
+Company and employed all kinds of ways to ruin the one he found
+established.  He gave to understand to M. Colbert that this country was
+too big to be bounded; that there should come out of it fleets and
+armies; his plans appeared too broad, still he met with no
+contradiction at first, on the contrary he was lauded, which moved him
+to establish a large trade and put out that of the company, which
+through bad success in its affairs at the Isles, was relaxing enough of
+itself in all sorts of undertakings.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. Talon desiring to bring together the government and the
+superintendence was spending on a large scale to make friends and
+therefore there was not a merchant when the Company quit who could
+transact any business in his presence; he gets his goods free of dues,
+freight and insurance; he also refused to pay the import tax on his
+wines, liquors and tobacco.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Finally his friends or enemies told him aloud that it was of profits of
+his commerce that the King would be enriched.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+They fell out, M. de Courcelles and he; their misunderstanding forced
+the first to ask for his discharge.  M. de Frontenac, who succeeded him
+also complained and I believe he returned to France without his cong�
+whence he never came back although he had promised so to all his
+friends.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+You are aware as well as and perhaps better than I of the disputes of
+M. de Frontenac and M. du Chesneau.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+And that is all I have been told for my satisfaction of what occurred
+previous to 1655 when I came here to attend to the affairs of the Rouen
+Company.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have also learned at the time of my arrival that properly speaking,
+though there were a very large number of Indians, known under divers
+names, which they bear with reference to certain action that their
+chiefs had performed or with reference to lakes, rivers, lands or
+mountains which they inhabit, or sometimes to animals stocking their
+rivers and forests, nevertheless they could all be comprised under two
+mother languages, to wit: the Huron and the Algonquin.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+At that period, I was told, the Huron was the most spread over men and
+territory, and at present, I believe, that the Algonquin can well be
+compared to it.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+To note, that all the Indians of the Algonquin language are stationed
+and occupy land that we call land of the North on account of the River
+which divides the country into two parts, and where they all live by
+fishing and hunting.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+As well as the Indians of the Huron language who inhabit land to the
+South, where they till the land and winter wheat, horse-beans, pease,
+and other similar seeds to subsist; they are sedentary and the
+Algonquin follow fish and game.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+However, this nation has always passed for the noblest, proudest and
+hardest to manage when prosperous.  When the French came here the true
+Algonquin owned land from Tadoussac to Quebec, and I have always
+thought they were issued from the Saguenay.  It was a tradition that
+they had expelled the Iroquois from the said place of Quebec and
+neighborhood where they once lived; we were shown the sites of their
+villages and towns covered by trees of a fresh growth, and now that the
+lands are of value through cultivation, the farmers find thereon tools,
+axes and knives as they were used to make them.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+We must believe that the said Algonquin were really masters over the
+said Iroquois, because they obliged them to move away so far.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Nobody could tell me anything certain about the origin of their war but
+it was of a more cruel nature between these two nations than between
+the said Iroquois and Hurons, who have the same language or nearly so.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It is only known that the Iroquois commenced first to burn, importuned
+by their enemies who came to break their heads whilst at work in their
+wilderness; they imagined that such cruel treatment would give them
+relaxation, and since, all the nations of this continent have used
+fire, with the exception of the Abenakis and other tribes of Virginia.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+These Iroquois having had the best of the fight and reduced the
+Algonquins since our discovery of this country, principally because
+their pride giving us apprehension about their large number, they would
+not arm themselves until a long time after the Dutch had armed the
+Iroquois, made war and ruined all the other nations who were not nearly
+so warlike as the Algonquin, and after the war, diseases came on that
+killed those remaining; some have scattered in the woods, but in
+comparison to what I have seen on my arrival, one might say that there
+are no more men in this country outside of the fastnesses of the
+forests recently discovered.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Hurons before their defeat by the Iroquois had, through the hope of
+their conversion obliged the Jesuits to establish with them a strong
+mission, and as from time to time it was necessary to carry to them
+necessities of life, the governors began to allow some of their
+servants to run up there every three or four years, from where they
+brought that good green (gras) Huron beaver that the hatters seek for
+so much.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Sometimes this was kept up; sometimes no one offered for the voyage
+there being then so little greediness it is true that the Iroquois were
+so feared; M. de Lauson was the only one to send two individuals in
+1656 who each secured 14 to 15,000 livres and came back with an indian
+fleet worth 100,000 crowns.  However, M. D'Argenson who succeeded him
+and was five years in the country sent nobody neither did Messrs
+Avaugour and de Mezy.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It was consequently after the arrival of M. Talon that under pretext of
+discovery, and of finding copper mines, he alone became director of
+those voyages, for he obliged M. de Courcelles to sign him cong�s which
+he got worked, but on a dispute between the workers he handled some
+himself, of which I remember.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+You know the number and the regulations given under the first
+administration of M. the Earl of Frontenac.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It is certain that it is the holders of cong�s who look after and bring
+down the beaver, and, can it be said that it is wrong to have an
+abundance of goods.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The French and the Indians have come down this year; the receipts of
+the office must total up 200 millions or thereabouts, which judging
+from your letter, will surprise those gentlemen very much.  The clerks
+have rejected it as much as they liked; I am told that they admitted
+somewhere about six thousands of muscovy; during our administration
+there were 28 or 30 thousands received, which is a large difference
+without taking into account other qualities, and all this does not give
+the French much trouble, and at the most for the year we were not
+informed.  I have given my sentiments to the meeting, and in particular
+to M. de Frontenac and to M. de Champigny.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+We should be agreeable to our Prince's wishes who is doing so much good
+to this country: his tenants who must supply him in such troubled
+times, lose, and it is proper that people in Canada contribute
+something to compensate them by freely agreeing to a pretty rich
+receipt on their commodity but what resource in regard to the indian so
+interested that everything moves with him, through necessity; they are
+asked and sought after to receive English goods, infinitely better than
+ours, at a cost half as low and to pay their beaver very high.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+This commercial communication gives them peace with their enemies and
+liberty to hunt, and consequently to live in abundance instead of their
+living at present with great hardship.  Should we not say that it
+requires a great affection not to break away in the face of such strong
+attractions; if we lose them once we lose them for ever, that it is
+certain, and from friends they become our enemies; thus we lose not
+only the beaver but the colony, and absolutely no more cattle, no more
+grains, no more fishing.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The colony with all the forces of the Kingdom cannot resist the Indians
+when they have the English or other Europeans to supply them with
+ammunitions of war, which leads me to the query: what is the beaver
+worth to the English that they seek to get it by all means?
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+If also the rumors set agoing are true the farmers-general would not
+sell a considerable part to the Danes at a very high price, should they
+not have had somebody in their employ who understands and knows that
+article well, it appears to me that the thing is worth while.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+All the same, people are asking why they want to sell so dear, what
+costs them so little, for taking one and the other, that going out this
+year should not cost them more than 50s (<I>sous</I>), the entries,
+Tadoussac, and the tax of one fourth, does it not pay the lease with
+profit.  This is in everybody's mind, and everyone looks at it as he
+fancies.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I was of opinion to arrange the receipts on a basis that these
+gentlemen got M. Benac to offer, so as to avoid the difficulties on the
+qualities, and this opinion served to examine the loss this proposition
+would bring to the country in the general receipt.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have no other interest than the Prince's service, and to please these
+gentlemen I should like to know, heartily, of some expedient, because
+it is absolutely necessary to find one to satisfy the Indian; M. the
+Earl of Frontenac is under a delusion: I may say it, they will give us
+the goby, and after that all shall be lost, I am not sure even, if they
+would not repeat the Sicilian Vespers, to show their good will, and
+that they never want to make it up.  I am so isolated that I do not say
+anything about it, as I am afraid for myself, but I know well that it
+is Indian's nature to betray, and that our affairs are not at all good
+in the upper country.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+To a great evil great remedy.  I had said to M. de Frontenac that the
+25 per cent could be abolished and make it up on something else, as it
+is a question of saving the country, but he did not deem fit of
+anything being said about it.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I also told him and M. de Champigny that we might treat with a Dutchman
+to bring on a clearance English and Dutch goods which are much thought
+of by our indians for their good quality and their price, that this
+vessel would not go up the river but stay below at a stated place,
+where we could go for his goods, and give him beaver for his rightful
+lading.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The company should have the control of these merchandise, so as to sell
+them to the indians on the base of a tariff, so as to prevent the
+greediness of the <I>voyageurs</I> which contributes very much to the
+discontent of the natives, because at first the French only went to the
+Hurons and since to Michilimakinac where they sold to the Indians of
+the locality, who then went to exchange with other indians in distant
+woods, lands and rivers, but now the said Frenchmen holding permits to
+have a larger gain pass over all the Ottawas and Indians of
+Michilimakinac to go themselves and find the most distant tribes which
+displeased the former very much.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+This has led to fine discoveries and four or five hundred young men of
+Canada's best men are employed at this business.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Through them we have become acquainted with several Indian's names we
+knew not, and 4 and 500 leagues farther away, there are other indians
+unknown to us.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Down the Gulf in French Acadia, we have always known the Abenakis and
+Micmacs.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+On the north shore of the River, from Seven islands up we have always
+known the Papinachois, Montagnais, Poissons Blancs, (White Fish),
+(these being in what is called limits of Tadoussac), Mistassinis,
+Algonquins.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+AT QUEBEC
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+There are Hurons, remains of the ancient Hurons, defeated by the
+Iroquois, in Lake Huron.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+There is also south of the Chaudi�re (River), five leagues from Quebec,
+a large village of Christian Abenakis.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Hurons &amp; Abenakis are under the Jesuit Fathers.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+These Hurons have staid at Quebec so as to pray God more conveniently
+and without fear of the Iroquois.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Abenakis pray God with more fervor than any Indians of these
+countries.  I have seen and been twice with them when warring; they
+must have faith to believe as they do and their exactitude to live well
+according to principles of our religion.  Blessed be God!  They are
+very good men at war and those who have give and still give so much
+trouble to the Bostoners.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+AT THREE-RIVERS
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Wolves and Algonquins both sides of the river.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+AT MONTROYAL OR VILLE-MARIE
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+There are Iroquois of the five nations who have left their home to pray
+(everyone is free to believe) but it is certain that threefourths have
+no other motive nor interest to stay with us than to pray.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+There are, then, Senecas, Mohawks, Cayugas, Wyandotts, Oneida partly on
+the mountain of Mont-Royal under the direction of Messrs of St Sulpice,
+and partly at the Sault (Recollet) south side, that is to say, above
+the rapids, under the R. F. Jesuits, whose mission is larger than St
+Sulpice's.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+150 leagues from Mont Royal the Grand River leading to the Ottawas; to
+the north are the Temiscamingues, Abitiby, Outanloubys, who speak
+Algonquin.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+At lake Nepissing, the Nipissiniens, Algonquin language, always going
+up the Grand River.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+In lake Huron, 200 leagues from Montreal, the Mississagues and
+Amikou�s: Algonquins.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+At Michilimackinac, the Negoaschendaching or people of the Sable,
+Ottawas, Linage Kikacons or Cut Tail, the men from Forked Lake
+Onnasaccoctois, the Hurons, in all 1000 men or thereabouts half Huron
+and half Algonquin language.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+In the Michigan or lake Illinois, north side, the Noquets, Algonquins,
+Malomini (Menomeenee), or men of the Folle-Avoine: different language.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+SOUTH OF PUANTS (GREEN) BAY
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Wanebagoes otherwise Puans, because of the name of the Bay;
+language different from the two others.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Sakis, 3 leagues from the Bay, and Pottewatamis, about 200 warriors.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Towards lake Illinois, on River St Joseph, the Miamis or men of the
+Crane who have three different languages, though they live together.
+United they would form about 600 men.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Above the Bay, on Fox river, the Ottagamis, the Mascoutins and the
+Kicapoos: all together 1200 men.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+At Maramegue river where is situated Nicholas Perrot's post, are some
+more Miamis numbering five to six hundred; always the same language.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The Illinois midway on the Illinois river making 5 to 6 different
+villages, making in all 2000 men.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+We traffic with all these nations who are all at war with the Iroquois.
+In the lower Missipy there are several other nations very numerous with
+whom we have no commerce and who are trading yet with nobody.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Above Missoury river which is of the Mississippi below the river
+Illinois, to the south, there are the Mascoutins Nadoessioux, with whom
+we trade, and who are numerous.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Sixty leagues above the missisipi and St Anthony of Padua Fall, there
+is lake Issaquy otherwise lake of Buade, where there are 23 villages of
+Sioux Nadoessioux who are called Issaquy, and beyond lake Oettatous,
+lower down the auctoustous, who are Sioux, and could muster together
+4000 warriors.  Because of their remoteness they only know the Iroquois
+from what they heard the French say.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+In lake Superior, south side are the saulteurs who are called Ouchijoe
+(objibway), Macomili, Ouxcinacomigo, Mixmac and living at Chagoumigon,
+it is the name of the country, the Malanas or men of the Cat-fish; 60
+men; always the Algonquin language.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Michipicoten, name of the land; the Machacoutiby and Opendachiliny,
+otherwise Dung-heads; lands' men; algonquin language.  The Picy is the
+name of a land of men, way inland, who come to trade.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Bagoasche, also name of a place of men of same nation who come also to
+trade 200 and 300 men.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Osepisagny river being discharge of lake Asemipigon; sometimes the
+indians of the lake come to trade; they are called Kristinos and the
+nation of the Great Rat.  These men are Algonquins, numbering more than
+2000, and also go to trade with the English of the north.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+There are too the Chichigoe who come sometimes to us, sometimes north
+to the English.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Towards West-Northwest, it is nations called Fir-trees; numerous; all
+their traffic is with the English.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+All those north nations are rovers, as was said, living on fish and
+game or wild-oats which is abundant on the shores of their lakes and
+rivers.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+In lake Ontario, south side, the five Iroquois nations; our enemies;
+about 1200 warriors live on indian corn and by hunting.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+We can say, that, of all the Indians they are the most cruel during
+war, as during peace they are the most humane, hospitable, and
+sociable; they are sensible at their meetings, and their behaviour
+resembles much to the manners of republics of Europe.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Lake Ontario has 200 leagues in circumference.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Lake Erie above Niagara 250 leagues; lakes Huron and Michigan joined
+552 leagues: to have access to these three lakes by boat, there is only
+the portage of Niagara, of two leagues, above the said lake Ontario.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+All those who have been through those lakes say they are terrestrial
+paradises for abundance of venison, game, fishing, and good quality of
+the land.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+From the said lakes to go to lake Superior there is only one portage of
+15 (?).  The said lake is 500 leagues long in a straight line, from
+point to point, without going around coves nor the bays of Michipicoten
+and Kaministiquia.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+To go from lake Superior to lake Asemipigon there is only 15 leagues to
+travel, in which happen seven portages averaging 3 good leagues; the
+said lake has a circumference of 280 leagues.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+From lake Huron to lake Nipissing there is the river called French
+River, 25 leagues long; there are 3 portages; the said lake has 60 to
+80 leagues of circumference.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Lake Assiniboel is larger than lake Superior, and an infinity of
+others, lesser and greater have to be discovered, for which I approve
+of M. the Marquis of Denonville's saying, often repeated:&mdash;that the
+King of France, our monarch was not high lord enough to open up such a
+vast country, as we are only beginning to enter on the confines of the
+immensity of such a great country.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The road to enter it is by the Grand River and lake Ontario by Niagara,
+which should be easy in peaceful times in establishing families at
+Niagara for the portage, and building boats on Lake Erie.  I did not
+find that a difficult thing, and I want to do it under M. the Marquis
+of Denonville, who did not care, so soon as he perceived that his war
+expedition had not succeeded.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+I have given you in this memorandum the names of the natives known to
+us and with whom our wood rovers (coureurs de bois) have traded; my
+information comes from some of the most experienced.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The surplus of the memorandum will serve to inform you that prior to M.
+de Tracy, de Courcelle and Talon's arrival, nothing was regulated but
+by the governor's will, although there was a Board; as they were his
+appointments and that by appearances, only his creatures got in, he was
+the absolute master of it and which was the cause that the Colony and
+the inhabitants suffered very much at the beginning.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+M. de Tracy on his arrival by virtue of his commission dismissed the
+Board and the Councillors, to appoint another one with members chosen
+by himself and the Bishop, which existed until the 2nd and 3rd year of
+M. de Frontenac's reign, who had them granted at Court, provisions by a
+decree for the establishment of the Council.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+It is only from that time that the King having given the country over
+to the gentlemen of the Co'y of West Indies, the tax of one fourth and
+the Tadoussac trade were looked upon as belonging to the Company, and
+since to the King, because M. Talon, who crippled as much as he could,
+this company dare not touch to these two items of the Domain, of which
+the enjoyment remained to them until cessation of their lease.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+So, it was in favor of this company that all the regulations were
+granted in reference to the limits and working out of Tadoussac as well
+as to prevent cheating on the beaver tax.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+Tadoussac is leased to six gentlemen for the sum of &mdash;&mdash; yearly; I took
+shares for one fourth, as it was an occasion to dispose of some goods
+and a profit to everyone of at most 20 &mdash;&mdash; yearly.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+About beavers there is no fraud to be feared, everybody preferring to
+get letters of exchange to avoid the great difficulties on going out,
+the entry and sale in France, and of large premiums for the risks; in a
+word, no one defrauds nor thinks of it.  The office is not large enough
+to receive all the beaver.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+The ships came in very late; I could not get M. Dumenu the secretary to
+the Board to send you the regulations you ask for the beaver trade; you
+shall have them, next year, if it pleases God.  They contain
+prohibition to embark from France under a penalty of 3000 livres' fine,
+confiscation of the goods, even of the ships; however, under the treaty
+of Normandy, I had a Dieppe captain seized for about 200 crowns worth
+of beaver, and the Council here confiscated the vessel, and imposed a
+fine of 1500 livres, on which the captain appealed to France, and he
+obtained at the King's Council, replevin on his ship and the fine was
+reduced to 30 livres.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="appendix">
+As prior to M. Talon nobody sent traders in the woods as explained in
+this memorandum there was not to my knowledge any regulation as to the
+said woods before the decree of 1675.  On the contrary I remember that
+those two individuals under M. de Lauzon's government who brought in
+each for 14. or 15,000 livres applied to me to be exempted from the tax
+of one fourth, because, they said we were obliged to them for having
+brought down a fleet which enriched the country.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="append1">
+(Not signed.)
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap13"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+INDEX
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+[Transcriber's note: Many index entries contain references like the
+"9&nbsp;n." in the "Arms" entry.  The "n." appears to refer to the footnote(s)
+that were on their host pages in the original book.  In this e-book,
+all footnotes have been moved to the end of their respective chapters.]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+A
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Abenaki Indians, the, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Abitiby Indians, the, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Acadia, Indian tribes located in, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Albanel, Charles, Jesuit missionary, 141; overland trip of, to Hudson
+Bay, 143-146; at King Charles Fort, 147.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Albany (Orange), 32; Iroquois freebooting expedition against, 36-38;
+Radisson's escape to, 39-41.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Algonquin Indian, murder of Mohawk hunters by a, 20.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Algonquin Indians, Radisson and Groseillers travel to the West with,
+73-79; territory of the, 359; wars with the Iroquois, 359-360; tribes
+of, on Lake Huron, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Allemand, Pierre, companion of Radisson, 154.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Allouez, P�re Claude, 142.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Amsterdam, Radisson's early visit to, 42.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Arctic Ocean, Hearne's overland trip to, 257-265; arrival at, 265-266;
+Mackenzie's trip of exploration to, 281-286.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Arms, supplied to Mohawks by Dutch, 9 n.; desire for, cause of Sioux'
+friendliness to Radisson, 120, 122.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Assiniboine Indians, origin of name, 10 n., 85; Radisson learns of,
+from prairie tribes, 85; defence of the younger Groseillers by, 184; De
+la V�rendrye meets the, 218-221; accompany De la V�rendrye to the
+Mandans, 223-227; Saint-Pierre's encounter with, 237.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Assiniboine River, 218, 219, 221-222.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Athabasca country, Hearne explores the, 268-269.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Athabasca Lake; Hearne's arrival at, 268-269.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Athabasca River, 277.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Athabascan tribes, Matonabbee and the, 249.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Aulneau, Father, 210, 211; killed by Indians, 214.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+B
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Baptism of Indian children by Radisson and Groseillers, 92.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Barren lands, region of "Little Sticks," 253-254, 259-260.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bath of purification, Indian, 14, 268.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bay of the North.  <I>See</I> Hudson Bay.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bayly, Charles, governor of Hudson's Bay Company, 140; in Canada,
+140-142; encounter with the Jesuit Albanel, 141-142, 147; accusations
+against Radisson and Groseillers, 147-148.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bear, Lewis's experience with a, 318.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Beauharnois, Charles de, governor of New France, 201, 203, 235.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Beaux Hommes</I>, Crow Indians, 232.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Beckworth, prisoner among Missouri Indians, 33.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Belmont, Abb�, cited, 5 n., 98 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bering, Vitus, 195.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bigot, intendant of New France, 236.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bird, prisoner of the Blackfeet, 33.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bird's egg moon, the (June), 279.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Blackbird, Omaha chief, grave of, 311.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bochart, governor of Three Rivers.  <I>See</I> Duplessis-Kerbodot.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bo�sme, Louis, 70.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Boissons</I>, drinking matches, 280.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Boston, Radisson and Groseillers in, 136.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bourassa, <I>voyageur</I>, 213.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bourdon, Jean, explorations by, 102, 134 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bow Indians, the, 232-233.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bridgar, John, governor of Hudson's Bay Company, 166, 169, 171, 173,
+174, 175, 180.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Brower, J. V., cited, 88 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bryce, Dr. George, 6 n., 88 n., 187 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Buffalo-hunts, Sioux, 92 n., 124.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Button, Sir Thomas, explorations of, 134 n.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+C
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cadieux, exploit and death of, 197-198.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cameahwait, Snake Indian chief, 324-326.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cannibalism among Indians, 24, 77.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cannibals of the Barren Lands, 255.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cape Breton, discovery and fortification of, 350.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Caribou, Radisson's remarks on, 127.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Caribou herds in Barren Lands, 255; Indian method of hunting, 259.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Carr, George, letter from, to Lord Darlington, 136 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Carr, Sir Robert, urges Radisson to renounce France, 136.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Carrier, Jacques, 71, 193, 350-351.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cartwright, Sir George, Radisson and Groseillers sail with, 136-137;
+shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Catlin, cited, 14 n., 226.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cayuga Indians, the, 34, 55, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chaboneau, guide to Lewis and Clark, 312, 326, 332.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chame, M., commissioner of Company of Normandy, 355, 357.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Champlain, governor in Canada, 351-353.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Charlevoix, mission of, 202.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chichigoe tribe of Indians, the, 365.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chinook Indians, Lewis and Clark friends with, 328.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chipewyans, bath of purification practised by, 14 n.; Hearne's journey
+with, 257-263; massacre of Eskimo by, 263-265.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chouart, M., letters of, 335-337.  <I>See</I> Groseillers, Jean Baptiste.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chouart, M�dard.   See Groseillers, M�dard Chouart.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Chronique Trifluvienne</I>, Sulte's, 4 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clark, William, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 308-309; exploration of
+Yellowstone River by, 329; hero-qualities of, 332-333.  <I>See</I> Lewis.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clatsop Indians, Lewis and Clark among the, 328.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clearwater River, Lewis and Clark on the, 327.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Coal, use of, by Indians, 89.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Colbert, Radisson pardoned and commissioned by, 148; withholds
+advancement from Radisson, 152; summons Radisson and Groseillers to
+France, 176-177; death of, 177.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Colleton, Sir Peter, shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Colter, frontiersman with Lewis and Clark, 332.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Columbia River, Lewis and Clark travel down the, 327.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Company of Miscou, the, 352.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Company of Normandy, the, 354-357.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Company of the North, the, 151, 154, 175, 176.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Company of One Hundred Associates, the, 133, 352, 353.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Company of Tadoussac, the, 352.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Company of the West Indies, the, 133, 153; account of formation of, 357.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Comport�, M., letter to, from M. Chouart, 335-336.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Coppermine River ("Far-Off-Metal River"), 245, 249, 252, 262, 267.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Copper mines, Radisson receives reports of, 112, 124; discovery of, by
+Hearne, 267.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Council Bluffs, origin of name, 311.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Council pipe, smoking the, 16, 29.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Couture, explorations of, 103, 129-130.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Couture (the younger), 143.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cree Indians, first reports of, 69, 85; Radisson's second visit to,
+112-113, 116; wintering in a settlement of, 117; a famine among,
+118-119; De la V�rendrye assisted by, 206-208.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Crow Indians, De la V�rendrye's sons among, 232-233.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+D
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dablon, Claude, Jesuit missionary, 103, 134 n., 142.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+D'Ailleboust, M., governor of Company of Normandy, 354.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dakota, Radisson's explorations in, 89.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+D'Argenson, Viscomte, governor of New France, 99, 129-130, 356-357, 360.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+D'Avaugour, governor, 104, 105, 107, 133, 143, 357, 360.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Death-song, Huron, 24, 54.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De Casson, Dollier, cited, 5 n., 96 n., 98 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De la Galissonni�re, governor, 235.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De la Jonqui�re, governor, 236.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De Lanoue, fur-trade pioneer, 204.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De la V�rendrye, Francois, 215, 222, 229, 230, 233.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De la V�rendrye, Jean Baptiste, 197, 205, 208-209, 210, 212; murder of,
+by Sioux, 214.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De la V�rendrye, Louis, 215, 229.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De la V�rendrye, Pierre, 215, 222, 229, 230, 235, 315.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De la V�rendrye, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, leaves Montreal on search
+for Western Sea (1731), 194-197; at Nepigon, 201; previous career,
+201-203; traverses Lake Superior to Kaministiquia, 204; Fort St. Pierre
+named for, 206; among the Cree Indians, 206-208; return to Quebec to
+raise supplies, 210; loss of eldest son in Sioux massacre, 214;
+explores Minnesota and Manitoba to Lake Winnipeg, 215-216; at Fort
+Maurepas, 217; return to Montreal with furs, 218; explores valley of
+the Assiniboine, 219-221; visits the Mandan Indians, 224-225; takes
+possession for France of the Upper Missouri, 225; superseded by De
+Noyelles (1746), 235; decorated with Order of Cross of St. Louis, 235;
+death at Montreal, 236.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De Niverville, lieutenant of Saint-Pierre, 236-237.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Denonville, Marquis of, 336, 366, 367.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De Noyelles, supersession of De la V�rendrye by, 235.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+De Noyon, explorations of, 204.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dieppe, merchants of, interested in Canada trade, 352, 353.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dionne, Dr. N. E., cited, 76 n., 88 n., 106 n., 139 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dog Rib Indians, Mackenzie among, 283-284.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dollard, fight of, against the Iroquois, 96-98, 198.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dreuillettes, Gabriel, discoveries by, 70-71, 103, 134 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Drewyer, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 331.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Drugging of Indians, 63-64.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Duchesnau, M. Jacques, 149 n., 358.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dufrost, Christopher, Sieur de la Jemmeraie, 197, 203, 205, 209, 210,
+211.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Du P�ron, Francois, 47.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Duplessis-Kerbodot, murder of, by Iroquois, 5 n., 19, 45.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dupuis, Major, at Onondaga, 46, 55-66.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dutch, arms supplied to Mohawk Indians by, 9 n.; war of, with the
+English, 137-138.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+E
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+England, arrival of Radisson and Groseillers in, 137; effect of war
+between Holland and, on exploring propositions, 137-138; Hudson's Bay
+Company organized in, 139-140; fur-trading expeditions from, 140-149.
+<I>See</I> Hudson's Bay Company <I>and</I> Radisson.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Erie Indians, the, 34.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Eskimo, massacre of, by Chipewyans, 263-265.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+F
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+"Far-Off-Metal River," the, 245, 249, 252; Hearne reaches the, 262.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Feasts, Indian, 60, 62-63, 67 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Festins � tout manger</I>, 60, 67 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fields, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 330-331.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Flathead Indians, assistance given Lewis and Clark by, 327, 328.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Floyd, Sergeant, of Lewis and Clark's expedition, 332.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Forked River, term applied to Mississippi and Missouri rivers, 86, 100;
+Radisson's account of people on the, 86-87.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort, Dollard's so-called, at the Long Sault, 97; Radisson and
+Groseillers', in the Northwest, 114-115.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Bourbon (Port Royal), on Hayes River, 161-175, 182-186.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Bourbon, on Saskatchewan, 229.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Chipewyan, 277.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark's winter quarters, 327-328.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Dauphin, 229.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort King Charles, 139, 146.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Lajonqui�re, 237.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Mandan, stars and stripes hoisted at, 312.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Maurepas, construction, 209; description, 216-217; De la V�rendrye
+at, 217.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Orange, Radisson and the Iroquois at, 36-38; Radisson's escape to,
+39-41.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Poskoyac, 229, 235.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Prince of Wales, building of, 243; description, 244-245; Hearne
+becomes governor of, 270; surrender and destruction of, 271-272.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort de la Reine, construction of, 222; De la V�rendrye returns to,
+after visiting Mandans, 228; abandonment of, 237.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort Rouge, 221.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort St. Charles, 208-209, 210, 215.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort St. Louis, of Quebec, first fortification on site of, 351.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort St. Pierre, 206.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fort William, 280, 283, 287.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fraser River, Mackenzie's explorations on, 294-302.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Frog moon, the (May), 279.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Frontenac, governor of New France, 154, 358, 360, 361, 362, 367.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fur companies of New France, 130, 133, 151, 153, 175-176, 352-358.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fur company, Hudson's Bay.  <I>See</I> Hudson's Bay Company.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fur trade, the French, 101-102, 104; regulations governing the, 104,
+153 n.; effect of, on development of West, 113.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+G
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gantlet, running the, 15-16.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gareau, Leonard, journey and death of, 70.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Garneau, cited, 5 n., 87 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gillam, Ben, encounters with Radisson, 163-164, 168-175.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gillam, Zechariah, Radisson's first transactions with, 135-136;
+Groseillers' voyage to Hudson Bay with, 138-139; at Rupert River with
+Hudson's Bay Company ship, 148; active enmity of, toward Radisson,
+165-167, 168-169, 171, 176, 180.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Godefroy, Jean, companion of Radisson, 154.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Godefroy family, the, 154 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Goose month (April), 253-254.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gorst, Thomas, 140 n., 147 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Grand River of the North.  <I>See</I> Mackenzie River.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gray, Captain, 308.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Great Falls of the Missouri, Lewis discovers the, 317.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Great Rat, nation of the, 131, 365.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Green Bay, western limit of French explorations until Radisson, 69;
+Radisson's winter quarters at, 79-80, 99-100.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Groseillers, nephew of explorer, title of nobility ordered granted to,
+142.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Groseillers, Jean Baptiste, accompanies Radisson to Hudson Bay (1682),
+154; trip up Hayes River, 158, 161; left in charge of Fort Bourbon,
+175; troubles with Indians and with English, 182-183; surrenders fort
+to Radisson, acting for Hudson's Bay Company, 184; letters to mother,
+184, 335-337; carried to England by force, 186; offer from Hudson's Bay
+Company, 187.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Groseillers, M�dard Chouart, birth, birthplace, and marriage, 45;
+journey to Lake Nipissing, 71; engages with Radisson in voyage of
+exploration to the West (1658), 71-79; winter quarters at Green Bay,
+79-80; explorations in West and Northwest, 80-90; return to Quebec, 99;
+second trip to Northwest (1661), 103-129; imprisoned and fined on
+return to Quebec (1663), 130; goes to France to seek reparation, 133;
+meets with neglect and indifference, 133-134; deceived into returning
+to Three Rivers and going to Isle Perc�e, 135; goes to Port Royal,
+N.S., becomes involved with Boston sea-captain, and reaches England
+<I>via</I> Boston and Spain (1666), 135-137; backed by Prince Rupert, fits
+out ship for Hudson Bay, and spends year in trading expedition
+(1668-1669),138-139; on return to London, created a <I>Knight de la
+Jarreti�re</I>, 139; second voyage from England (1670), 140; involved with
+Radisson in suspicions of double-dealing, 147-148; in meeting of fur
+traders at Quebec, 149; retires to family at Three Rivers, 151;
+summoned by Radisson to join expedition in private French interests to
+Hayes River (1681-1682), 153-158; successful trade in furs, 158, 167;
+jealousy and lawsuits on return to Quebec, 175-176; summoned to France
+by Colbert (1684), 176-177; petition for redress of wrongs ignored by
+French court, 179; gives up struggle and retires to Three Rivers, 179.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+H
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hayes, Sir James, 180, 181.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hayes River, Radisson's canoe trip up the, 158-160; Fort Bourbon
+established on, 161; Radisson's second visit to, 182-186.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hayet, Marguerite, Radisson's sister, 6 n., 43; death of first husband,
+19, 45; marriage with Groseillers, 45; letters from son, 184, 335-337.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hayet, S�bastien, 6 n., 43 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hearne, Samuel, cited, 14 n.; departure from Fort Prince of Wales on
+exploring trip, 249-252; in the Barren Lands, 253-255, 259-260; crosses
+the Arctic Circle, 261; discovers the Coppermine River, 262-263;
+massacre of Eskimo by Indians accompanying, 264-265; arrival at Arctic
+Ocean, 265; takes possession of Arctic regions for Hudson's Bay
+Company, 266-267; returns up the Coppermine River and discovers copper
+mines, 267; travels in Athabasca region, 268-269; returns to Fort
+Prince of Wales, 269; becomes governor of post, 270; surrenders fort to
+the French, 271-272.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+H�nault, Madeline, Radisson's mother, 6 n., 43.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hudson Bay, overland routes to, 71; Radisson's early discoveries
+regarding, 90-91, 127-128.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Hudson Bay</I>, Robson's, cited, 139 n., 140 n., 147 n., 161 n., 166 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hudson's Bay Company, origin of, 139-140; early expeditions, 140-149;
+distrust of Radisson by, 150; contract between Radisson and, 181-182;
+final treaty of peace made between Indians and, 185; poor treatment of
+Radisson by, 188; quietly prosperous career of, 241-242; encroachments
+of French traders, 242-243; demand for activity, 243-244; possession
+taken of Arctic regions for, by Hearne, 266-267.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Huron Indians, death songs of, 24, 54; massacre of Christian, by
+Iroquois, 50-54; band of, with Dollard, against the Iroquois, 97-98;
+territory of, 359; tribes of, at Michilimackinac, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Husky dogs, 277.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+I
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Icebergs, Labradorian, 155.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Iroquois Confederacy, the five tribes composing the, 34;
+characteristics of, 366.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Iroquois Indians, murder of inhabitants of Three Rivers by, 5 n., 19,
+45; treatment of prisoners by, 15-16, 25-28, 54; Radisson's life with,
+16-39; Frenchmen at Montreal scalped by, 48; hostages of, held at
+Quebec, 48, 55-56; siege of Onondaga by, 55-67; encounters between
+Algonquins and Radisson and, 76-78, 79-80;  Radisson's fight with, on
+the Grand Sault, 94-96; Bollard's battle with, 97-98; Radisson's fights
+with, on second Western trip, 107-108, 109-111; wars between Algonquins
+and, 359.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Isle of Massacres, 50-54.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Issaguy tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+J
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jemmeraie, Sieur de la, De la V�rendrye's lieutenant, 197, 203, 205,
+209, 210; death of, 211.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Jesuit Relations</I>, cited, 57 n., 69 n., 71 n., 73 n., 80 n., 81 n., 82
+n., 91 n., 92 n., 96 n., 141 n.; quoted, 88.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jesuits, in Onondaga expedition, 44-67; lives of Iroquois saved by, 65;
+start with Radisson and Groseillers on first Western expedition, 73;
+turn back to Montreal, 77.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jogues, Father, 4, 56, 68, 69.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jolliet, 84 n., 149, 151.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+K
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Kaministiquia, fur post at, 204.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Kickapoo Indians, location of, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+King Charles Fort.  <I>See</I> Fort King Charles.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Kirke, Mary, marriage with Radisson, 138; becomes a Catholic, 152.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Kirke, Sir John, shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140; claims of,
+against New France, 152; forbids daughter's going to France, 152;
+friendly influence used for Radisson, 180.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Knight de la Jarreti�re</I>, Groseillers created a, 139.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+L
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+La Barre, governor of New France, 176
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+La Chesnaye, cited, 115 n., 131 n.; backs Radisson in Northern
+expedition, 152-153; outcome of Radisson's dealings with, 175-176.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lake Assiniboel, 366.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+"Lake of the Castors," the (Lake Nipissing), 76 n., 106 n., 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lake Ontario, tribes about, 366.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lake Superior, exploration of, by Radisson, 89; explorer's second visit
+to, 111-112.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lamoignon, M. de, president of Company of Normandy, 355, 356, 357.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+La Perouse, French admiral, 271.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Larivi�re, companion of Radisson and Groseillers, 105, 106-107.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+La Salle, 84 n., 85, 149, 151, 194.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lauzon, M. de, governor of Company of Normandy, 355-356, 368.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+La Valli�re, 103.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+La V�rendrye.  <I>See</I> De la V�rendrye.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ledyard, John, 308.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation</I>, cited, 46 n., 58 n., 60 n., 63 n.,
+81 n., 90 n., 96 n., 98 n., 139 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lewis, Meriwether, starts on expedition to explore Missouri and
+Columbia rivers, 308-309; reaches villages of Mandan Indians, 311-313;
+first views the Rocky Mountains, 314-315; discovers the Great Falls of
+the Missouri, 317; narrowly escapes death from a bear, 318-319; enters
+the Gates of the Rockies, 321; reaches sources of the Missouri,
+322-323; makes friends with Snake Indians, 323-327; crosses Divide to
+the Clearwater River and travels down the Columbia, 327; arrival on
+Pacific Ocean, 327; winters at Fort Clatsop (1805-1806), 327-328;
+return trip by main stream of the Missouri, 329; adventures with
+Minnetaree Indians, 329-331; arrival at St. Louis, 332; tribute to
+character and qualities of, 332-333.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Liberte, traitor in Lewis and Clark's expedition, 311.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Little Missouri, Lewis and Clark pass the, 313.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+"Little Sticks," region of, 253-254, 259-260.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+London, Radisson's first visit to, 137-138.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Long Sault, Rapids of, Dollard's battle at, 96-98, 198.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lord Preston, English envoy in France, 177, 180, 181.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Low, A. P., quoted, 128 n., 146 n., 149 n.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+M
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mackay, Alexander, Mackenzie's lieutenant, 288, 291, 292, 293, 296, 299.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, early career of, 276; stationed at Fort
+Chipewyan, 276-277; exploration of Mackenzie River by, 280-285; crosses
+the Arctic Circle, 285; reaches Arctic Ocean, 285-286; returns up the
+Mackenzie to Fort Chipewyan, 286; exploration of Peace River by,
+288-294; discovers source of Peace River, 294; crosses the Divide and
+reaches head waters of Fraser River, 294; travels down the Fraser,
+294-298; adventures with Indians, 298-300; reaches the Pacific Ocean,
+302-303; return to Fort Chipewyan <I>via</I> Peace River, 304-305; later
+life, 306.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mackenzie, Charles, 311.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mackenzie, Roderick, 278, 279.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mackenzie River, exploration of, 280-287, 296-302.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mandan Indians, bath of purification practised by, 14 n.; Radisson
+discovers the, 86, 88; De la V�rendrye's visit to, 222, 225-227; the
+younger De la V�rendryes' second visit to, 230-231; Lewis and Clark at
+villages of, 311-313, 332.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Manitoba, Radisson's explorations in, 113-128.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Marquette, P�re, 84 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Martin, Abraham, Plains of Abraham named for, 45 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Martin, Helen, Groseillers' first wife, 45 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Martini�re, plan of, to capture Radisson for French, 188.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mascoutins, "people of the fire," 80, 131 n., 364, 365; location of
+the, 86; Radisson among the, 100.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Matonabbee, chief of Chipewyans, 248-249; aid afforded Hearne by,
+256-263; massacre of Eskimo directed by, 264-265; suicide of, 272.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+M�nard, Father, 105, 112.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Messaiger, Father, 204, 205, 209.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Miami Indians, location of the, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Michigan, Indian tribes in, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Michilimackinac, Island of, Radisson; passes, 112; early headquarters
+of fur trade, 201; Indian tribes at, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Micmac Indians, the, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Minnesota, dispute as to discovery of eastern, 71 n.; Radisson's
+explorations in, 89; Radisson may have wintered in, on second trip, 113.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Minnetaree Indians, Lewis and the, 329-331.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mississippi, Radisson discovers the Upper, 80-81.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mississippi Valley, Radisson first to explore the, 85-89.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Missouri, tribes of the, 86; De la V�rendrye takes possession of the
+Upper, 225; Lewis and Clark explore the, 313-323.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mistassini, Lake, Father Albanel at, 146.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mistassini Indians, the, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mohawk Indians, murder of French of Three Rivers by, 5 n., 19, 45;
+adoption of Radisson by a family of, 17; murder of three, by Radisson
+and an Algonquin, 20; jealous as to French settlement among Onondagas,
+47-48; siege of Onondaga by, 55-59; outwitted by Radisson at Onondaga,
+59-67; location of the, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Montagnais Indians, the, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Montana, punishment of Indians by scouts in, 25 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Montmagny, M. de, governor in Canada, 353-354.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Montreal, expedition for Onondaga leaves, 47; Iroquois scalp Frenchmen
+at, 48; return of Onondaga party, 66; De la V�rendrye's departure from,
+194-197; Indian tribes located in vicinity of, 363-364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Munck, explorations of, 134 n.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+N
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+"Nation of the Grand Rat," 131, 365.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nelson River, Radisson on the, 140, 161, 164-167, 170-174, 179 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nemisco River, called the Rupert, 139.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nepigon, De la V�rendrye at, 201, 202.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+New York in 1653, 41-42.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>New York Colonial Documents</I>, 9 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nez Perces Indians, help given to Lewis and Clark by, 328.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nicolet, Jean, 68, 69.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nicolls, Colonel Richard, quoted, 136 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nipissing, Lake, 76 n., 106 n., 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nipissinien Indians, the, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Northwest, the Great, discovery of, by Radisson, 80-85.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Northwest Fur Company, the, 279, 280, 287.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Northwest Passage, reward of L20,000 offered for discovery of, 278.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Norton, Marie, 247, 270, 271-272.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Norton, Moses, governor of Fort Prince of Wales, 244; character of,
+246-247; death of, 269-270.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+O
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ochagach, Indian hunter, 202.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Octbaton tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ojibway Indians, 115, 365.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Oldmixon, John, cited, 92 n., 114 n., 130 n., 147 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Omaha Indians, Radisson's possible visit to, 86, 88.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Omtou tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Oneida Indians, the, 34, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Onondaga, settlement at, 46; Iroquois conspiracy against, 46-48;
+garrison besieged at, 55-63; escape of French from, 64-67.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Onondaga tribe, the, 34; Jesuit mission among (1656), 46-47;
+treacherous conduct of, toward Christian Hurons, 50-54.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Orange.  <I>See</I> Albany.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Orimha, Radisson's Mohawk name, 16.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Oudiette, Jean, 154 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+"Ouinipeg," Lake, 69, 71.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Outanlouby Indians, the, 364.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+P
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pacific Ocean, Mackenzie's expedition reaches the, 302-303; Lewis and
+Clark's expedition reaches, 327.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Papinachois Indians, the, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Parkman, Francis, cited, 5 n., 19 n., 46 n., 87 n., 96 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Pays d'en Haut</I>, "Up-Country," defined, 201 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Peace River, the, 281; exploration of, 287; Mackenzie reaches the
+source of the, 294.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pemmican, defined, 223.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+"People of the Fire," the, Mascoutin Indians, 80 n., 86 n., 100, 131 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior, the, 112.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Piescaret, Algonquin chief, 4.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pipe of peace, smoking the, 121-123.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Plains of Abraham, named for Abraham Martin, 45 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Poinsy, M. de, commander at St. Christopher, 353.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Poissons Blancs (White Fish) Indians, the, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Poncet, P�re, 41.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Port Nelson, 140, 161-175, 182-186.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Port Royal, Nova Scotia, Radisson and Groseillers at, 135.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Prince Maximilian, 226.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Prince Rupert, patron of French explorers, 138-139, 180; first governor
+of Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Prisoners, treatment of, by Iroquois, 15-16, 25-28, 54.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Prudhomme, Mr. Justice, 88 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Purification, bath of, Indian rite, 14, 268.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Q
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Quebec, Iroquois hostages for safety of Onondaga held at, 48, 55-56;
+celebration at, on return of Radisson and Groseillers, 99; meeting of
+fur traders at (1676), 149; Indian tribes located about, 363.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+R
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit (the elder), 6 n., 43 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit, uncle of the explorer, 43 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit, date and place of birth, 6; genealogy of, 6
+n., 43 n.; captured by Iroquois Indians, 9; adopted into Mohawk tribe,
+17; escape to Fort Orange (1653), 39-41; proof of Catholicism of, 41
+n.; visits Europe and returns to Three Rivers (1654), 42-44; joins
+expedition to Onondaga (1657), 47; besieged by Iroquois throughout
+winter, 55-64; saves the garrison and returns to Montreal, 65-67; goes
+on trapping and exploring trip to the West (1658), 73-74; reaches Lake
+Nipissing and Lake Huron, 78; in winter quarters at Green Bay, 79-80;
+crosses present state of Wisconsin and discovers Upper Mississippi,
+80-85; explorations to the west and south, 86-89; in Minnesota and
+Manitoba, 89-91; encounter with Iroquois at Long Sault of the Ottawa,
+94-96; at scene of Dollard's fight of a week before, 96-98; arrival at
+Quebec (1660), 99; sets forth on voyage of discovery toward Hudson Bay
+(1661), 105; traverses Lake Superior, 111-112; builds fort and winters
+west of present Duluth, 113-116; visits the Sioux, 123-124; reaches
+Lake Winnipeg, 127; returns to Quebec (1663), 129; bad treatment by
+French officials, 130; goes to France to gain his rights, 133-134;
+ill-treatment, deception by Rochelle merchant, dealings with Captain
+Gillam of Boston, and visit to Boston (1665), 134-136; goes to England,
+137-138; marriage with Mary Kirke, 138; formation of Hudson's Bay
+Company (1670), 139-140; trading voyage to Port Nelson (1671), 140-141;
+recalled to England and poorly treated (1674-1675), 148; receives
+commission in French navy (1675-1676), 148; complications between
+wife's father and French government, 152; backed by La Chesnaye,
+engages in new expedition to Hudson Bay, 152-153; returns to Quebec
+(1681) and sails to Hayes River (1682), 153-158; troubles with English
+and Boston ships, 161-175; jealousy and lawsuits on return to Quebec,
+175-177; unsuccessfully presses claims in France, 179-180; commissioned
+by Hudson's Bay Company, 181-182; sails to Hayes River and takes
+possession of Fort Bourbon and French furs (1684), 182-185; return to
+England, 186-187; annual voyages to Hudson Bay for five years, 188;
+distrusted on breaking out of war with France, and neglect in old age,
+188-189: consideration of character and career, 189-190.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Radisson's Relation</I>, cited, 9 n., 46 n., 63 n., 80 n., 81 n., 98 n.,
+99 n., 122, 127, 163 n., 179; language used in, 82; time of writing,
+138.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ragueneau, Father Paul, 46 n., 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59 n., 63 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rascal Village, Indian camp, 305.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Red River, first white men on, 219.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rhythm as an Indian characteristic, 160 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ricaree Indians, insolence of, to Lewis and Clark, 311-312.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Robson, cited, 139, 140, 147, 161, 166.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rochelle, Radisson's visit to, in 1654, 43.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rocky Mountains, Radisson's nearest approach to the, 89; Pierre de la
+V�rendrye reaches the, 233; Lewis's first view of the, 314-315; Lewis
+and Clark enter Gates of the, 321.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rouen, merchants of, interested in Canada trade, 352, 353, 357.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Roy, J. Edmond, cited, 102 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Roy, R., translations of documents, 335.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rupert River, the Nemisco renamed the, 139.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+S
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sacajawea, squaw guide to Lewis and Clark, 312, 321, 326, 332.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+St. Louis, departure of Lewis and Clark's expedition from, 308-309;
+return to, 332.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Saint-Lusson, Sieur de, 142.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Saint-Pierre, Legardeur de, 236-237.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Saskatchewan River, exploration of, 229.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sautaux Indians, the, 89-90, 92 n., 131 n., 365.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Scalp dance, the, 12, 14.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Seneca Indians, the, 34, 55, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sioux Indians, the, 69; Radisson and the, 85, 88, 120-124; desire of,
+for firearms, 120, 122; location of the, 365.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Skull-crackers, Indian, defined, 25, 121.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Slave Lake, Mackenzie on, 282.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Slave Lake Indians, the, 280, 282, 290.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Smith, Donald (Lord Strathcona), 275-276.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Snake Indians, Lewis and Clark make friends with, 323-326.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Society of One Hundred.  <I>See</I> Company of One Hundred Associates.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Songs, Indian, 159, 160.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sturgeons, Radisson's river of, 112.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sulte, Benjamin, cited, 4, 5 n., 6 n., 7 n., 19 n., 43 n., 68 n., 76
+n., 86 n., 99 n., 102 n., 139 n., 154 n.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+T
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Tadoussac (Quebec), Company of, 352.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Talon, intendant of New France, 7 n., 142-143, 357-358, 360, 367, 368.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Tanguay, Abb�, 5 n., 19 n., 88 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Tar bed, Mackenzie's discovery of a, in the Arctic, 286.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Temiscamingue Indians, the, 364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Thousand Islands, massacre of Huron captives by Iroquois at, 53-54.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Three Forks of the Missouri, Lewis and Clark arrive at, 321.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Three Rivers, population of, 7 n.; in 1654, 44-45; De la V�rendrye born
+at, 201; Indians of, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Touret, Eli Godefroy, French spy, 137.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Torture, Indian methods of, 15-16, 25-28, 54.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Travaille</I>, defined, 224.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Tripe de roches</I>, defined, 78.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+V
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+V�rendrye.  <I>See</I> De la V�rendrye.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ville-Marie (Montreal), Indian tribes about, 363-364.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Voorhis, Mrs. Julia Clark, Clark letters owned by, 312 n.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+W
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wampum, significance to Indians, 17.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+War-cry, Indian, sounds representing the, 11 n.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Waste, viewed by Indians as crime, 60.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+West Indies Company.  <I>See</I> Company of the West Indies.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Windsor, member of Lewis and Clark's expedition, 315-316.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Winnipeg, Lake, first reports of, 69, 71; Radisson arrives at, 127;
+rumours of a tide on, 216; De la V�rendrye on, 216-218.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wisconsin, Radisson's travels in, 80-8l, 89.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wolf Indians located at Three Rivers, 363.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wyandotte Indians, the, 364.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Y
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Yellowstone River, exploration of, by Lewis and Clark, 313, 329.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+York (Port Nelson), 140, 161-175, 182-186.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Young, Sir William, champions Radisson's cause, 180, 181, 188.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pathfinders of the West, by A. C. Laut
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pathfinders of the West, by A. C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Pathfinders of the West
+       Being the Thrilling Story of the Adventures of the Men Who
+       Discovered the Great Northwest: Radisson, La Verendrye,
+       Lewis and Clark
+
+Author: A. C. Laut
+
+Release Date: April 20, 2006 [EBook #18216]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATHFINDERS OF THE WEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: Stealing from the Fort by Night.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Pathfinders of the West
+
+
+
+BEING
+
+THE THRILLING STORY OF THE ADVENTURES
+
+OF THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED THE GREAT NORTHWEST
+
+RADISSON, LA VERENDRYE, LEWIS AND CLARK
+
+
+
+
+
+BY
+
+A. C. LAUT
+
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "LORDS OF THE NORTH," "HERALDS
+  OF EMPIRE," "STORY OF THE TRAPPER"
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+
+REMINGTON, GOODWIN, MARCHAND
+
+AND OTHERS
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP
+
+PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1904,
+
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+
+
+
+Set up and electrotyped.  Published November, 1904.  Reprinted February,
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+WILDWOOD PLACE, WASSAIC, N.Y.
+
+August 15, 1904.
+
+
+DEAR MR. SULTE:
+
+A few years ago, when I was a resident of the Far West and tried to trace
+the paths of early explorers, I found that all authorities--first,
+second, and third rate--alike referred to one source of information for
+their facts.  The name in the tell-tale footnote was invariably your own.
+
+While I assume _all_ responsibility for upsetting the apple cart of
+established opinions by this book, will you permit me to dedicate it to
+you as a slight token of esteem to the greatest living French-Canadian
+historian, from whom we have all borrowed and to whom few of us have
+rendered the tribute due?
+
+Faithfully,
+
+AGNES C. LAUT.
+
+
+ MR. BENJAMIN SULTE,
+ PRESIDENT ROYAL SOCIETY,
+ OTTAWA, CANADA.
+
+
+
+
+  THE GREAT NORTHWEST
+
+  I love thee, O thou great, wild, rugged land
+  Of fenceless field and snowy mountain height,
+  Uprearing crests all starry-diademed
+  Above the silver clouds!  A sea of light
+  Swims o'er thy prairies, shimmering to the sight
+  A rolling world of glossy yellow wheat
+  That runs before the wind in billows bright
+  As waves beneath the beat of unseen feet,
+  And ripples far as eye can see--as far and fleet!
+
+  Here's chances for every man!  The hands that work
+  Become the hands that rule!  Thy harvests yield
+  Only to him who toils; and hands that shirk
+  Must empty go!  And here the hands that wield
+  The sceptre work!  O glorious golden field!
+  O bounteous, plenteous land of poet's dream!
+  O'er thy broad plain the cloudless sun ne'er wheeled
+  But some dull heart was brightened by its gleam
+  To seize on hope and realize life's highest dream!
+
+  Thy roaring tempests sweep from out the north--
+  Ten thousand cohorts on the wind's wild mane--
+  No hand can check thy frost-steeds bursting forth
+  To gambol madly on the storm-swept plain!
+  Thy hissing snow-drifts wreathe their serpent train,
+  With stormy laughter shrieks the joy of might--
+  Or lifts, or falls, or wails upon the wane--
+  Thy tempests sweep their stormy trail of white
+  Across the deepening drifts--and man must die, or fight!
+
+  Yes, man must sink or fight, be strong or die!
+  That is thy law, O great, free, strenuous West!
+  The weak thou wilt make strong till he defy
+  Thy bufferings; but spacious prairie breast
+  Will never nourish weakling as its guest!
+  He must grow strong or die!  Thou givest all
+  An equal chance--to work, to do their best--
+  Free land, free hand--thy son must work or fall
+  Grow strong or die!  That message shrieks the storm-wind's call!
+
+  And so I love thee, great, free, rugged land
+  Of cloudless summer days, with west-wind croon,
+  And prairie flowers all dewy-diademed,
+  And twilights long, with blood-red, low-hung moon
+  And mountain peaks that glisten white each noon
+  Through purple haze that veils the western sky--
+  And well I know the meadow-lark's far rune
+  As up and down he lilts and circles high
+  And sings sheer joy--be strong, be free; be strong or die!
+
+
+
+
+Foreword
+
+The question will at once occur why no mention is made of Marquette and
+Jolliet and La Salle in a work on the pathfinders of the West.  The
+simple answer is--they were _not_ pathfinders.  Contrary to the notions
+imbibed at school, and repeated in all histories of the West,
+Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle did not discover the vast region
+beyond the Great Lakes.  Twelve years before these explorers had
+thought of visiting the land which the French hunter designated as the
+_Pays d'en Haut_, the West had already been discovered by the most
+intrepid _voyageurs_ that France produced,--men whose wide-ranging
+explorations exceeded the achievements of Cartier and Champlain and La
+Salle put together.
+
+It naturally rouses resentment to find that names revered for more than
+two centuries as the first explorers of the Great Northwest must give
+place to a name almost unknown.  It seems impossible that at this late
+date history should have to be rewritten.  Such is the fact _if we
+would have our history true_.  Not Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle
+discovered the West, but two poor adventurers, who sacrificed all
+earthly possessions to the enthusiasm for discovery, and incurred such
+bitter hostility from the governments of France and England that their
+names have been hounded to infamy.  These were Sieur Pierre Esprit
+Radisson and Sieur Medard Chouart Groseillers, fur traders of Three
+Rivers, Quebec. [1]
+
+The explanation of the long oblivion obscuring the fame of these two
+men is very simple.  Radisson and Groseillers defied, first New France,
+then Old France, and lastly England.  While on friendly terms with the
+church, they did not make their explorations subservient to the
+propagation of the faith.  In consequence, they were ignored by both
+Church and State.  The _Jesuit Relations_ repeatedly refer to two young
+Frenchmen who went beyond Lake Michigan to a "Forked River" (the
+Mississippi), among the Sioux and other Indian tribes that used coal
+for fire because wood did not grow large enough on the prairie.
+Contemporaneous documents mention the exploits of the young Frenchmen.
+The State Papers of the Marine Department, Paris, contain numerous
+references to Radisson and Groseillers.  But, then, the _Jesuit
+Relations_ were not accessible to scholars, let alone the general
+public, until the middle of the last century, when a limited edition
+was reprinted of the Cramoisy copies published at the time the priests
+sent their letters home to France.  The contemporaneous writings of
+Marie de l'Incarnation, the Abbe Belmont, and Dollier de Casson were
+not known outside the circle of French savants until still later; and
+it is only within recent years that the Archives of Paris have been
+searched for historical data.  Meantime, the historians of France and
+England, animated by the hostility of their respective governments,
+either slurred over the discoveries of Radisson and Groseillers
+entirely, or blackened their memories without the slightest regard to
+truth.  It would, in fact, take a large volume to contradict and
+disprove half the lies written of these two men.  Instead of consulting
+contemporaneous documents,--which would have entailed both cost and
+labor,--modern writers have, unfortunately, been satisfied to serve up
+a rehash of the detractions written by the old historians.  In 1885
+came a discovery that punished such slovenly methods by practically
+wiping out the work of the pseudo-historians.  There was found in the
+British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and Hudson's Bay House, London,
+unmistakably authentic record of Radisson's voyages, written by
+himself.  The Prince Society of Boston printed two hundred and fifty
+copies of the collected Journals.  The Canadian Archives published the
+journals of the two last voyages.  Francis Parkman was too
+conscientious to ignore the importance of the find; but his history of
+the West was already written.  He made what reparation he could to
+Radisson's memory by appending a footnote to subsequent editions of two
+of his books, stating that Radisson and Groseillers' travels took them
+to the "Forked River" before 1660.  Some ten other lines are all that
+Mr. Parkman relates of Radisson; and the data for these brief
+references have evidently been drawn from Radisson's enemies, for the
+explorer is called "a renegade."  It is necessary to state this,
+because some writers, whose zeal for criticism was much greater than
+their qualifications, wanted to know why any one should attempt to
+write Radisson's life when Parkman had already done so.
+
+Radisson's life reads more like a second Robinson Crusoe than sober
+history.  For that reason I have put the corroborative evidence in
+footnotes, rather than cumber the movement of the main theme.  I am
+sorry to have loaded the opening parts with so many notes; but
+Radisson's voyages change the relative positions of the other explorers
+so radically that proofs must be given.  The footnotes are for the
+student and may be omitted by the general reader.  The study of
+Radisson arose from, using his later exploits on Hudson Bay as the
+subject of the novel, _Heralds of Empire_.  On the publication of that
+book, several letters came from the Western states asking how far I
+thought Radisson had gone beyond Lake Superior before he went to Hudson
+Bay.  Having in mind--I am sorry to say--mainly the early records of
+Radisson's enemies, I at first answered that I thought it very
+difficult to identify the discoverer's itinerary beyond the Great
+Lakes.  So many letters continued to come on the subject that I began
+to investigate contemporaneous documents.  The path followed by the
+explorer west of the Great Lakes--as given by Radisson himself--is here
+written.  Full corroboration of all that Radisson relates is to be
+found--as already stated--in chronicles written at the period of his
+life and in the State Papers.  Copies of these I have in my possession.
+Samples of the papers bearing on Radisson's times, copied from the
+Marine Archives, will be found in the Appendix.  One must either accept
+the explorer's word as conclusive,--even when he relates his own
+trickery,--or in rejecting his journal also reject as fictions the
+_Jesuit Relations_, the _Marine Archives_, _Dollier de Casson_, _Marie
+de l'Incarnation_, and the _Abbe Belmont_, which record the same events
+as Radisson.  In no case has reliance been placed on second-hand
+chronicles.  Oldmixon and Charlevoix must both have written from
+hearsay; therefore, though quoted in the footnotes, they are not given
+as conclusive proof.  The only means of identifying Radisson's routes
+are (1) by his descriptions of the countries, (2) his notes of the
+Indian tribes; so that personal knowledge of the territory is
+absolutely essential in following Radisson's narrative.  All the
+regions traversed by Radisson--the Ottawa, the St. Lawrence, the Great
+Lakes, Labrador, and the Great Northwest--I have visited, some of them
+many times, except the shores of Hudson Bay, and of that region I have
+some hundreds of photographs.
+
+Material for the accounts of the other pathfinders of the West has been
+drawn directly from the different explorers' journals.
+
+For historical matter I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. N. E.
+Dionne of the Parliamentary Library, Quebec, whose splendid sketch of
+Radisson and Groseillers, read before the Royal Society of Canada, does
+much to redeem the memory of the discoverers from ignominy; to Dr.
+George Bryce of Winnipeg, whose investigation of Hudson's Bay Archives
+adds a new chapter to Radisson's life; to Mr. Benjamin Sulte of Ottawa,
+whose destructive criticism of inaccuracies in old and modern records
+has done so much to stop people writing history out of their heads and
+to put research on an honest basis; and to M. Edouard Richard for
+scholarly advice relating to the Marine Archives, which he has
+exploited so thoroughly.  For transcripts and archives now out of
+print, thanks are due Mr. L. P. Sylvain of the Parliamentary Library,
+Ottawa, the officials of the Archives Department, Ottawa, Mr. F. C.
+Wurtele of Quebec, Professor Andrew Baird of Winnipeg, Mr. Alfred
+Matthews of the Prince Society, Boston, the Hon. Jacob V. Brower and
+Mr. Warren Upham of St. Paul.  Mr. Lawrence J. Burpee of Ottawa was so
+good as to give me a reading of his exhaustive notes on La Verendrye
+and of data found on the Radisson family.  To Mrs. Fred Paget of
+Ottawa, the daughter of a Hudson's Bay Company officer, and to Mr. and
+Mrs. C. C. Farr of the Northern Ottawa, I am indebted for interesting
+facts on life in the fur posts.  Miss Talbot of Winnipeg obtained from
+retired officers of the Hudson's Bay Company a most complete set of
+photographs relating to the fur trade.  To her and to those officers
+who loaned old heirlooms to be photographed, I beg to express my
+cordial appreciation.  And the thanks of all who write on the North are
+permanently due Mr. C. C. Chipman, Chief Commissioner of the Hudson's
+Bay Company, for unfailing courtesy in extending information.
+
+
+WILDWOOD PLACE,
+
+WASSAIC, N.Y.
+
+
+[1] I of course refer to the West as beyond the Great Lakes; for
+Nicotet, in 1634, and two nameless Frenchmen--servants of Jean de
+Lauzon--in 1654, had been beyond the Sault.
+
+
+
+
+Just as this volume was going to the printer, I received a copy of the
+very valuable Minnesota _Memoir_, Vol. VI, compiled by the Hon. J. V.
+Brower of St. Paul, to whom my thanks are due for this excellent
+contribution to Western annals.  It may be said that the authors of
+this volume have done more than any other writers to vindicate Radisson
+and Groseillers as explorers of the West.  The very differences of
+opinion over the regions visited establish the fact that Radisson _did_
+explore parts of Minnesota.  I have purposely avoided trying to say
+_what_ parts of Minnesota he exploited, because, it seems to me, the
+controversy is futile.  Radisson's memory has been the subject of
+controversy from the time of his life.  The controversy--first between
+the governments of France and England, subsequently between the French
+and English historians--has eclipsed the real achievements of Radisson.
+To me it seems non-essential as to whether Radisson camped on an island
+in the Mississippi, or only visited the region of that island.  The
+fact remains that he discovered the Great Northwest, meaning by that
+the region west of the Mississippi.  The same dispute has obscured his
+explorations of Hudson Bay, French writers maintaining that he went
+overland to the North and put his feet in the waters of the bay, the
+English writers insisting that he only crossed over the watershed
+toward Hudson Bay.  Again, the fact remains that he did what others had
+failed to do--discovered an overland route to the bay.  I am sorry that
+Radisson is accused in this _Memoir_ of intentionally falsifying his
+relations in two respects, (1) in adding a fanciful year to the
+1658-1660 voyage; (2) in saying that he had voyaged down the
+Mississippi to Mexico.  (1) Internal evidence plainly shows that
+Radisson's first four voyages were written twenty years afterward, when
+he was in London, and not while on the voyage across the Atlantic with
+Cartwright, the Boston commissioner.  It is the most natural thing in
+the world that Radisson, who had so often been to the wilds, should
+have mixed his dates.  Every slip as to dates is so easily checked by
+contemporaneous records--which, themselves, need to be checked--that it
+seems too bad to accuse Radisson of wilfully lying in the matter.  When
+Radisson lied it was to avoid bloodshed, and not to exalt himself.  If
+he had had glorification of self in mind, he would not have set down
+his own faults so unblushingly; for instance, where he deceives M.
+Colbert of Paris.  (2) Radisson does not try to give the impression
+that he went to Mexico.  The sense of the context is that he met an
+Indian tribe--Illinois, Mandans, Omahas, or some other--who lived next
+to another tribe who told _of_ the Spaniards.  I feel almost sure that
+the scholarly Mr. Benjamin Sulte is right in his letter to me when he
+suggests that Radisson's manuscript has been mixed by transposition of
+pages or paragraphs, rather than that Radisson himself was confused in
+his account.  At the same time every one of the contributors to the
+Minnesota _Memoir_ deserves the thanks of all who love _true_ history.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+Since the above foreword was written, the contents of this volume have
+appeared serially in four New York magazines.  The context of the book
+was slightly abridged in these articles, so that a very vital
+distinction--namely, the difference between what is given as in
+dispute, and what is given as incontrovertible fact--was lost; but what
+was my amusement to receive letters from all parts of the West all but
+challenging me to a duel.  One wants to know "how a reputable author
+dare" suggest that Radisson's voyages be taken as authentic.  There is
+no "dare" about it.  It is a fact.  For any "reputable" historian to
+suggest--as two recently have--that Radisson's voyages are a
+fabrication, is to stamp that historian as a pretender who has not
+investigated a single record contemporaneous with Radisson's life.  One
+cannot consult documents contemporaneous with his life and not learn
+instantly that he was a very live fact of the most troublesome kind the
+governments of France and England ever had to accept.  That is why it
+impresses me as a presumption that is almost comical for any modern
+writer to condescend to say that he "accepts" or "rejects" this or that
+part of Radisson's record.  If he "rejects" Radisson, he also rejects
+the _Marine Archives of Paris_, and the _Jesuit Relations_, which are
+the recognized sources of our early history.
+
+Another correspondent furiously denounces Radisson as a liar because he
+mixes his dates of the 1660 trip.  It would be just as reasonable to
+call La Salle a liar because there are discrepancies in the dates of
+his exploits, as to call Radisson a liar for the slips in his dates.
+When the mistakes can be checked from internal evidence, one is hardly
+justified in charging falsification.
+
+A third correspondent is troubled by the reference to the Mascoutin
+Indians being _beyond_ the Mississippi.  State documents establish this
+fact.  I am not responsible for it; and Radisson could not circle
+west-northwest from the Mascoutins to the great encampments of the
+Sioux without going far west of the Mississippi.  Even if the Jesuits
+make a slip in referring to the Sioux's use of some kind of coal for
+fire because there was no wood on the prairie, and really mean turf or
+buffalo refuse,--which I have seen the Sioux use for fire,--the fact is
+that only the tribes far west of the Mississippi habitually used such
+substitutes for wood.
+
+My Wisconsin correspondents I have offended by saying that Radisson
+went beyond the Wisconsin; my Minnesota friends, by saying that he went
+beyond Minnesota; and my Manitoba co-workers of past days, by
+suggesting that he ever went beyond Manitoba.  The fact remains that
+when we try to identify Radisson's voyages, we must take his own
+account of his journeyings; and that account establishes him as the
+Discoverer of the Northwest.
+
+For those who know, I surely do not need to state that there is no
+picture of Radisson extant, and that some of the studies of his life
+are just as genuine (?) as alleged old prints of his likeness.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON
+
+ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO EXPLORE THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST,
+AND THE NORTH
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
+
+The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk
+Valley--In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
+escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the
+Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE
+
+Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the
+Iroquois Mission--He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the
+Thousand Islands--Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as
+Prisoners of War--Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+RADISSON'S THIRD VOYAGE
+
+The Discovery of the Great Northwest--Radisson and his Brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, visit what are now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and the
+Canadian Northwest--Radisson's Prophecy on first beholding the
+West--Twelve Years before Marquette and Jolliet, Radisson sees the
+Mississippi--The Terrible Remains of Dollard's Fight seen on the Way
+down the Ottawa--Why Radisson's Explorations have been ignored
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+RADISSON'S FOURTH VOYAGE
+
+The Success of the Explorers arouses Envy--It becomes known that they
+have heard of the Famous Sea of the North--When they ask Permission to
+resume their Explorations, the French Governor refuses except on
+Condition of receiving Half the Profits--In Defiance, the Explorers
+steal off at Midnight--They return with a Fortune and are driven from
+New France
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+RADISSON RENOUNCES ALLEGIANCE TO TWO CROWNS
+
+Rival Traders thwart the Plans of the Discoverers--Entangled in
+Lawsuits, the Two French Explorers go to England--The Organization of
+the Hudson's Bay Fur Company--Radisson the Storm-centre of
+International Intrigue--Boston Merchants in the Struggle to capture the
+Fur Trade
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+RADISSON GIVES UP A CAREER IN THE NAVY FOR THE FUR TRADE
+
+Though opposed by the Monopolists of Quebec, he secures Ships for a
+Voyage to Hudson Bay--Here he encounters a Pirate Ship from Boston and
+an English Ship of the Hudson's Bay Company--How he plays his Cards to
+win against Both Rivals
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE LAST VOYAGE OF RADISSON TO HUDSON BAY
+
+France refuses to restore the Confiscated Furs and Radisson tries to
+redeem his Fortune--Reengaged by England, he captures back Fort Nelson,
+but comes to Want in his Old Age--His Character
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY OF
+THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, THE MISSOURI UPLANDS, AND THE VALLEY OF THE
+SASKATCHEWAN
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA
+
+M. de la Verendrye continues the Exploration of the Great Northwest by
+establishing a Chain of Fur Posts across the Continent--Privations of
+the Explorers and the Massacre of Twenty Followers--His Sons visit the
+Mandans and discover the Rockies--The Valley of the Saskatchewan is
+next explored, but Jealousy thwarts the Explorer, and he dies in Poverty
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE LEADS SAMUEL HEARNE TO THE ARCTIC
+CIRCLE AND ATHABASCA REGION
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SAMUEL HEARNE
+
+The Adventures of Hearne in his Search for the Coppermine River and
+Northwest Passage--Hilarious Life of Wassail led by Governor
+Norton--The Massacre of the Eskimo by Hearne's Indians North of the
+Arctic Circle--Discovery of the Athabasca Country--Hearne becomes
+Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but is captured by the
+French--Death of Norton and Suicide of Matonabbee
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES--HOW MACKENZIE CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES
+AND LEWIS AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES
+
+How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed
+across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the Question of a
+Northwest Passage
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LEWIS AND CLARK
+
+The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend
+the Columbia to the Pacific--Exciting Adventures on the Canons of the
+Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone--Lewis'
+Escape from Hostiles
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Stealing from the Fort by Night . . . . . . Frontispiece
+
+Map of the Great Fur Country
+
+Three Rivers in 1757
+
+Map of the Iroquois Country in the Days of Radisson
+
+Albany from an Old Print
+
+The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time
+
+Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in Holland
+
+One of the Earliest Maps of the Great Lakes
+
+Paddling past Hostiles
+
+Jogues, the Jesuit Missionary, who was tortured by the Mohawks
+
+Chateau de Ramezay, Montreal
+
+A Cree Brave, with the Wampum String
+
+An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux
+
+Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in Montreal
+
+Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River
+
+Montreal in 1760
+
+Chateau St. Louis, Quebec, 1669
+
+A Parley on the Plains
+
+Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three Rivers
+
+Skin for Skin, Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay Company
+
+Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from
+  Tea-chests at York Factory
+
+Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower
+  Fort Garry, Red River
+
+Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight
+
+Fights at the Foothills of the Rockies, between Crows and Snakes
+
+Each Man landed with Pack on his Back and trotted away over Portages
+
+A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands
+
+A Group of Cree Indians
+
+The Soldiers marched out from Mount Royal for the Western Sea
+
+Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca River
+
+The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains
+
+Hungry Hall, 1870
+
+A Monarch of the Plains
+
+Fur Traders towed down the Saskatchewan in the Summer of 1900
+
+Tepees dotted the Valley
+
+An Eskimo Belle
+
+Samuel Hearne
+
+Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle
+
+Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun
+
+Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago
+
+Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's drawing, 1733-1747
+
+Fort Prince of Wales
+
+Beaver Coin of the Hudson's Bay Company
+
+Alexander Mackenzie
+
+Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for the
+  Value of Three Beaver Skins
+
+Quill and Beadwork on Buckskin
+
+Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior
+
+Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River
+
+Slave Lake Indians
+
+Good Hope, Mackenzie River, Hudson's Bay Company Fort
+
+The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight Sun
+
+Captain Meriwether Lewis
+
+Captain William Clark
+
+Tracking up Stream
+
+Typical Mountain Trapper
+
+The Discovery of the Great Falls
+
+Fighting a Grizzly
+
+Packer carrying Goods across Portage
+
+Spying on Enemy's Fort
+
+Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies
+
+On Guard
+
+Indians of the Up-country or Pays d'en Haut
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON
+
+ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO
+  EXPLORE THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST,
+  AND THE NORTH
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Map of the Great Fur Company.]
+
+
+
+Pathfinders of the West
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+1651-1653
+
+RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
+
+The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk
+Valley--In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
+escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the
+Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape
+
+
+Early one morning in the spring of 1652 three young men left the little
+stockaded fort of Three Rivers, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence,
+for a day's hunting in the marshes of Lake St. Peter.  On one side were
+the forested hills, purple with the mists of rising vapor and still
+streaked with white patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the
+sunlight.  On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence,
+more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of
+rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese
+flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just
+as they do to-day.  Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice
+poured their spring flood into the St. Lawrence.
+
+The hunters were very young.  Only hunters rash with the courage of
+untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all
+the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the
+little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year.
+Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three
+Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois.
+The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had
+been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in
+the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France.  It was from
+Three Rivers that Piescaret, the famous Algonquin chief who could
+outrun a deer, had set out against the Iroquois, turning his snowshoes
+back to front, so that the track seemed to lead north when he was
+really going south, and then, having thrown his pursuers off the trail,
+coming back on his own footsteps, slipping up stealthily on the
+Iroquois that were following the false scent, and tomahawking the
+laggards.[1]  It was from Three Rivers that the Mohawks had captured
+the Algonquin girl who escaped by slipping off the thongs that bound
+her.  Stepping over the prostrate forms of her sleeping guards, such a
+fury of revenge possessed her that she seized an axe and brained the
+nearest sleeper, then eluded her pursuers by first hiding in a hollow
+tree and afterward diving under the debris of a beaver dam.
+
+[Illustration: Three Rivers in 1757.]
+
+These things were known to every inhabitant of Three Rivers.  Farmers
+had flocked into the little fort and could venture back to their fields
+only when armed with a musket.[2]  Yet the three young hunters rashly
+left the shelter of the fort walls and took the very dangerous path
+that led between the forests and the water.  One of the young men was
+barely in his seventeenth year.[3]  This was Pierre Esprit Radisson,
+from St. Malo, the town of the famous Cartier.  Young Radisson had only
+come to New France the year before, and therefore could not realize the
+dangers of Indian warfare.  Like boys the world over, the three went
+along, boasting how they would fight if the Indians came.  One skirted
+the forest, on the watch for Iroquois, the others kept to the water, on
+the lookout for game.  About a mile from Three Rivers they encountered
+a herdsman who warned them to keep out from the foot of the hills.
+Things that looked like a multitude of heads had risen out of the earth
+back there, he said, pointing to the forests.  That set the young
+hunters loading their pistols and priming muskets.  It must also have
+chilled their zest; for, shooting some ducks, one of the young men
+presently declared that he had had enough--he was going back.  With
+that daring which was to prove both the lodestar and the curse of his
+life, young Radisson laughed to scorn the sudden change of mind.
+Thereupon the first hunter was joined by the second, and the two went
+off in high dudgeon.  With a laugh, Pierre Radisson marched along
+alone, foreshadowing his after life,--a type of every pathfinder facing
+the dangers of the unknown with dauntless scorn, an immortal type of
+the world-hero.
+
+Shooting at every pace and hilarious over his luck, Radisson had
+wandered some nine miles from the fort, when he came to a stream too
+deep to ford and realized that he already had more game than he could
+possibly carry.  Hiding in hollow trees what he could not bring back,
+he began trudging toward Three Rivers with a string of geese, ducks,
+and odd teal over his shoulders, Wading swollen brooks and scrambling
+over windfalls, he retraced his way without pause till he caught sight
+of the town chapel glimmering in the sunlight against the darkening
+horizon above the river.  He was almost back where his comrades had
+left him; so he sat down to rest.  The cowherd had driven his cattle
+back to Three Rivers.[4]  The river came lapping through the rushes.
+There was a clacking of wild-fowl flocking down to their marsh nests;
+perhaps a crane flopped through the reeds; but Radisson, who had
+laughed the nervous fears of the others to scorn, suddenly gave a start
+at the lonely sounds of twilight.  Then he noticed that his pistols
+were water-soaked.  Emptying the charges, he at once reloaded, and with
+characteristic daring crept softly back to reconnoitre the woods.
+Dodging from tree to tree, he peered up and down the river.  Great
+flocks of ducks were swimming on the water.  That reassured him, for
+the bird is more alert to alarm than man.  The fort was almost within
+call.  Radisson determined to have a shot at such easy quarry; but as
+he crept through the grass toward the game, he almost stumbled over
+what rooted him to the spot with horror.  Just as they had fallen,
+naked and scalped, with bullet and hatchet wounds all over their
+bodies, lay his comrades of the morning, dead among the rushes.
+Radisson was too far out to get back to the woods.  Stooping, he tried
+to grope to the hiding of the rushes.  As he bent, half a hundred heads
+rose from the grasses, peering which way he might go.  They were
+behind, before, on all sides--his only hope was a dash for the
+cane-grown river, where he might hide by diving and wading, till
+darkness gave a chance for a rush to the fort.  Slipping bullet and
+shot in his musket as he ran, and ramming down the paper, hoping
+against hope that he had not been seen, he dashed through the
+brushwood.  A score of guns crashed from the forest.[5]  Before he
+realized the penalty that the Iroquois might exact for such an act, he
+had fired back; but they were upon him.  He was thrown down and
+disarmed.  When he came giddily to his senses, he found himself being
+dragged back to the woods, where the Iroquois flaunted the fresh scalps
+of his dead friends.  Half drawn, half driven, he was taken to the
+shore.  Here, a flotilla of canoes lay concealed where he had been
+hunting wild-fowl but a few hours before.  Fires were kindled, and the
+crotched sticks driven in the ground to boil the kettle for the evening
+meal.  The young Frenchman was searched, stripped, and tied round the
+waist with a rope, the Indians yelling and howling like so many wolves
+all the while till a pause was given their jubilation by the alarm of a
+scout that the French and Algonquins were coming.  In a trice, the fire
+was out and covered.  A score of young braves set off to reconnoitre.
+Fifty remained at the boats; but if Radisson hoped for a rescue, he was
+doomed to disappointment.  The warriors returned.  Seventy Iroquois
+gathered round a second fire for the night.  The one predominating
+passion of the savage nature is bravery.  Lying in ambush, they had
+heard this French youth laugh at his comrades' fears.  In defiance of
+danger, they had seen him go hunting alone.  After he had heard an
+alarm, he had daringly come out to shoot at the ducks.  And, then, boy
+as he was, when attacked he had instantly fired back at numerous enough
+enemies to have intimidated a score of grown men.  There is not the
+slightest doubt it was Radisson's bravery that now saved him from the
+fate of his companions.
+
+His clothes were returned.  While the evening meal was boiling, young
+warriors dressed and combed the Frenchman's hair after the manner of
+braves.  They daubed his cheeks with war-paint; and when they saw that
+their rancid meats turned him faint, they boiled meat in clean water
+and gave him meal browned on burning sand.[6]  He did not struggle to
+escape, so he was now untied.  That night he slept between two warriors
+under a common blanket, through which he counted the stars.  For fifty
+years his home was to be under the stars.  It is typically Radisson
+when he could add: "I slept a sound sleep; for they wakened me upon the
+breaking of the day."  In the morning they embarked in thirty-seven
+canoes, two Indians in each boat, with Radisson tied to the cross-bar
+of one, the scalps lying at his feet.  Spreading out on the river, they
+beat their paddles on the gunwales of the canoes, shot off guns, and
+uttered the shrill war-cry--"Ah-oh!  Ah-oh!  Ah-oh!" [7]  Lest this
+were not sufficient defiance to the penned-up fort on the river bank,
+the chief stood up in his canoe, signalled silence, and gave three
+shouts.  At once the whole company answered till the hills rang; and
+out swung the fleet of canoes with more shouting and singing and firing
+of guns, each paddle-stroke sounding the death knell to the young
+Frenchman's hopes.
+
+By sunset they were among the islands at the mouth of the Richelieu,
+where muskrats scuttled through the rushes and wild-fowl clouded the
+air.  The south shore of Lake St. Peter was heavily forested; the
+north, shallow.  The lake was flooded with spring thaw, and the Mohawks
+could scarcely find camping-ground among the islands.  The young
+prisoner was deathly sick from the rank food that he had eaten and
+heart-sick from the widening distance between himself and Three Rivers.
+Still, they treated him kindly, saying, "Chagon!  Chagon!--Be merry!
+Cheer up!"  The fourth day up the Richelieu, he was embarked without
+being fastened to the cross-bar, and he was given a paddle.  Fresh to
+the work, Radisson made a labor of his oar.  The Iroquois took the
+paddle and taught him how to give the light, deft, feather strokes of
+the Indian canoeman.  On the river they met another band of warriors,
+and the prisoner was compelled to show himself a trophy of victory and
+to sing songs for his captors.  That evening the united bands kindled
+an enormous campfire and with the scalps of the dead flaunting from
+spear heads danced the scalp dance, reenacting in pantomime all the
+episodes of the massacre to the monotonous chant-chant, of a recitative
+relating the foray.  At the next camping-ground, Radisson's hair was
+shaved in front and decorated on top with the war-crest of a brave.
+Having translated the white man into a savage, they brought him one of
+the tin looking-glasses used by Indians to signal in the sun.  "I,
+viewing myself all in a pickle," relates Radisson, "smeared with red
+and black, covered with such a top, . . . could not but fall in love
+with myself, if I had not had better instructions to shun the sin of
+pride."
+
+Radisson saw that apparent compliance with the Mohawks might win him a
+chance to escape; so he was the first to arise in the morning, wakening
+the others and urging them that it was time to break camp.  The stolid
+Indians were not to be moved by an audacious white boy.  Watching the
+young prisoner, the keepers lay still, feigning sleep.  Radisson rose.
+They made no protest.  He wandered casually down to the water side.
+One can guess that the half-closed eyelids of his guards opened a
+trifle: was the mouse trying to get away from the cat?  To the Indians'
+amusement, instead of trying to escape, Radisson picked up a spear and
+practised tossing it, till a Mohawk became so interested that he jumped
+up and taught the young Frenchman the proper throws.  That day the
+Indians gave him the present of a hunting-knife.  North of Lake
+Champlain, the river became so turbulent that they were forced to land
+and make a _portage_.  Instead of lagging, as captives frequently did
+from very fear as they approached nearer and nearer what was almost
+certain to mean death-torture in the Iroquois villages--Radisson
+hurried over the rocks, helping the older warriors to carry their
+packs.  At night he was the first to cut wood for the camp fire.
+
+About a week from the time they had left Lake St. Peter, they entered
+Lake Champlain.  On the shores of the former had been enacted the most
+hideous of all Indian customs--the scalp dance.  On the shores of the
+latter was performed one of the most redeeming rites of Indian warfare.
+Round a small pool of water a coppice of branches was interlaced.  Into
+the water were thrown hot stones till the enclosure was steaming.  Here
+each warrior took a sweat-bath of purification to prepare for reunion
+with his family.  Invoking the spirits as they bathed, the warriors
+emerged washed--as they thought--of all blood-guilt.[8]
+
+[Illustration: Map of the Iroquois country in the days of Radisson.]
+
+In the night shots sounded through the heavy silence of the forest, and
+the Mohawks embarked in alarm, compelling their white prisoner to lie
+flat in the bottom of the canoe.  In the morning when he awakened, he
+found the entire band hidden among the rushes of the lake.  They spent
+several days on Lake Champlain, then glided past wooded mountains down
+a calm river to Lake George, where canoes were abandoned and the
+warriors struck westward through dense forests to the country of the
+Iroquois.  Two days from the lake slave women met the returning braves,
+and in Radisson's words, "loaded themselves like mules with baggage."
+On this woodland march Radisson won golden opinions for himself by two
+acts: struck by an insolent young brave, he thrashed the culprit
+soundly; seeing an old man staggering under too heavy a load, the white
+youth took the burden on his own shoulders.
+
+The return of the warriors to their villages was always celebrated as a
+triumph.  The tribe marched out to meet them, singing, firing guns,
+shouting a welcome, dancing as the Israelites danced of old when
+victors returned from battle.  Men, women, and children lined up on
+each side armed with clubs and whips to scourge the captives.  Well for
+Radisson that he had won the warriors' favor; for when the time came
+for him to run the gantlet of Iroquois _diableries_, instead of being
+slowly led, with trussed arms and shackled feet, he was stripped free
+and signalled to run so fast that his tormentors could not hit him.
+Shrieks of laughter from the women, shouts of applause from the men,
+always greeted the racer who reached the end of the line unscathed.  A
+captive Huron woman, who had been adopted by the tribe, caught the
+white boy as he dashed free of a single blow clear through the lines of
+tormentors.  Leading him to her cabin, she fed and clothed him.
+Presently a band of braves marched up, demanded the surrender of
+Radisson, and took him to the Council Lodge of the Iroquois for
+judgment.
+
+Old men sat solemnly round a central fire, smoking their calumets in
+silence.  Radisson was ordered to sit down.  A coal of fire was put in
+the bowl of the great Council Pipe and passed reverently round the
+assemblage.  Then the old Huron woman entered, gesticulating and
+pleading for the youth's life.  The men smoked on silently with deep,
+guttural "ho-ho's," meaning "yes, yes, we are pleased."  The woman was
+granted permission to adopt Radisson as a son.  Radisson had won his
+end.  Diplomacy and courage had saved his life.  It now remained to
+await an opportunity for escape.
+
+Radisson bent all his energies to become a great hunter.  He was given
+firearms, and daily hunted with the family of his adoption.  It so
+happened that the family had lost a son in the wars, whose name had
+signified the same as Radisson's--that is, "a stone"; so the Pierre of
+Three Rivers became the Orimha of the Mohawks.  The Iroquois husband of
+the woman who had befriended him gave such a feast to the Mohawk braves
+as befitted the prestige of a warrior who had slain nineteen enemies
+with his own hand.  Three hundred young Mohawks sat down to a collation
+of moose nose and beaver tails and bears' paws, served by slaves.  To
+this banquet Radisson was led, decked out in colored blankets with
+garnished leggings and such a wealth of wampum strings hanging from
+wrists, neck, hair, and waist that he could scarcely walk.  Wampum
+means more to the Indian than money to the white man.  It represents
+not only wealth but social standing, and its value may be compared to
+the white man's estimate of pink pearls.  Diamond-cutters seldom spend
+more than two weeks in polishing a good stone.  An Indian would spend
+thirty days in perfecting a single bit of shell into fine wampum.
+Radisson's friends had ornamented him for the feast in order to win the
+respect of the Mohawks for the French boy.  Striking his hatchet
+through a kettle of sagamite to signify thus would he break peace to
+all Radisson's foes, the old Iroquois warrior made a speech to the
+assembled guests.  The guests clapped their hands and shouted, "Chagon,
+Orimha!--Be merry, Pierre!"  The Frenchman had been formally adopted as
+a Mohawk.
+
+
+The forests were now painted in all the glories of autumn.  All the
+creatures of the woodlands shook off the drowsy laziness of summer and
+came down from the uplands seeking haunts for winter retreat.  Moose
+and deer were on the move.  Beaver came splashing down-stream to
+plaster up their wattled homes before frost.  Bear and lynx and marten,
+all were restless as the autumn winds instinct with coming storm.  This
+is the season when the Indian sets out to hunt and fight.  Furnished
+with clothing, food, and firearms, Radisson left the Mohawk Valley with
+three hunters.  By the middle of August, the rind of the birch is in
+perfect condition for peeling.  The first thing the hunters did was to
+slit off the bark of a thick-girthed birch and with cedar linings make
+themselves a skiff.  Then they prepared to lay up a store of meat for
+the winter's war-raids.  Before ice forms a skim across the still
+pools, nibbled chips betray where a beaver colony is at work; so the
+hunters began setting beaver traps.  One night as they were returning
+to their wigwam, there came through the leafy darkness the weird sound
+of a man singing.  It was a solitary Algonquin captive, who called out
+that he had been on the track of a bear since daybreak.  He probably
+belonged to some well-known Iroquois, for he was welcomed to the
+camp-fire.  The sight of a face from Three Rivers roused the
+Algonquin's memories of his northern home.  In the noise of the
+crackling fire, he succeeded in telling Radisson, without being
+overheard by the Iroquois, that he had been a captive for two years and
+longed to escape.
+
+"Do you love the French?" the Algonquin asked Radisson.
+
+"Do you love the Algonquin?" returned Radisson, knowing they were
+watched.
+
+"As I do my own nation."  Then leaning across to Radisson,
+"Brother--white man!--Let us escape!  The Three Rivers--it is not far
+off!  Will you live like a Huron in bondage, or have your liberty with
+the French?"  Then, lowering his voice, "Let us kill all three this
+night when they are asleep!"
+
+From such a way of escape, the French youth held back.  The Algonquin
+continued to urge him.  By this time, Radisson must have heard from
+returning Iroquois warriors that they had slain the governor of Three
+Rivers, Duplessis-Kerbodot, and eleven other Frenchmen, among whom was
+the husband of Radisson's eldest sister, Marguerite.[9]
+
+While Radisson was still hesitating, the suspicious Iroquois demanded
+what so much whispering was about; but the alert Algonquin promptly
+quieted their fears by trumping up some hunting story.  Wearied from
+their day's hunt, the three Mohawks slept heavily round the camp-fire.
+They had not the least suspicion of danger, for they had stacked their
+arms carelessly against the trees of the forest.  Terrified lest the
+Algonquin should attempt to carry out his threat, Radisson pretended to
+be asleep.  Rising noiselessly, the Algonquin sat down by the fire.
+The Mohawks slept on.  The Algonquin gave Radisson a push.  The French
+boy looked up to see the Algonquin studying the postures of the
+sleeping forms.  The dying fire glimmered like a blotch of blood under
+the trees.  Stepping stealthy as a cat over the sleeping men, the
+Indian took possession of their firearms.  Drawn by a kind of horror,
+Radisson had risen.  The Algonquin thrust one of the tomahawks into the
+French lad's hands and pointed without a word at the three sleeping
+Mohawks.  Then the Indian began the black work.  The Mohawk nearest the
+fire never knew that he had been struck, and died without a sound.
+Radisson tried to imitate the relentless Algonquin, but, unnerved with
+horror, he bungled the blow and lost hold of the hatchet just as it
+struck the Mohawk's head.  The Iroquois sprang up with a shout that
+awakened the third man, but the Algonquin was ready.  Radisson's blow
+proved fatal.  The victim reeled back dead, and the third man was
+already despatched by the Algonquin.
+
+Radisson was free.  It was a black deed that freed him, but not half so
+black as the deeds perpetrated in civilized wars for less cause; and
+for that deed Radisson was to pay swift retribution.
+
+Taking the scalps as trophies to attest his word, the Algonquin threw
+the bodies into the river.  He seized all the belongings of the dead
+men but one gun and then launched out with Radisson on the river.  The
+French youth was conscience-stricken.  "I was sorry to have been in
+such an encounter," he writes, "but it was too late to repent."  Under
+cover of the night mist and shore foliage, they slipped away with the
+current.  At first dawn streak, while the mist still hid them, they
+landed, carried their canoe to a sequestered spot in the dense forest,
+and lay hidden under the upturned skiff all that day, tormented by
+swarms of mosquitoes and flies, but not daring to move from
+concealment.  At nightfall, they again launched down-stream, keeping
+always in the shadows of the shore till mist and darkness shrouded
+them, then sheering off for mid-current, where they paddled for dear
+life.  Where camp-fires glimmered on the banks, they glided past with
+motionless paddles.  Across Lake Champlain, across the Richelieu, over
+long _portages_ where every shadow took the shape of an ambushed
+Iroquois, for fourteen nights they travelled, when at last with many
+windings and false alarms they swept out on the wide surface of Lake
+St. Peter in the St. Lawrence.
+
+Within a day's journey of Three Rivers, they were really in greater
+danger than they had been in the forests of Lake Champlain.  Iroquois
+had infested that part of the St. Lawrence for more than a year.  The
+forest of the south shore, the rush-grown marshes, the wooded islands,
+all afforded impenetrable hiding.  It was four in the morning when they
+reached Lake St. Peter.  Concealing their canoe, they withdrew to the
+woods, cooked their breakfast, covered the fire, and lay down to sleep.
+In a couple of hours the Algonquin impatiently wakened Radisson and
+urged him to cross the lake to the north shore on the Three Rivers
+side.  Radisson warned the Indian that the Iroquois were ever lurking
+about Three Rivers.  The Indian would not wait till sunset.  "Let us
+go," he said.  "We are past fear.  Let us shake off the yoke of these
+whelps that have killed so many French and black robes (priests). . . .
+If you come not now that we are so near, I leave you, and will tell the
+governor you were afraid to come."
+
+Radisson's judgment was overruled by the impatient Indian.  They pushed
+their skiff out from the rushes.  The water lay calm as a sea of
+silver.  They paddled directly across to get into hiding on the north
+shore.  Halfway across Radisson, who was at the bow, called out that he
+saw shadows on the water ahead.  The Indian stood up and declared that
+the shadow was the reflection of a flying bird.  Barely had they gone a
+boat length when the shadows multiplied.  They were the reflections of
+Iroquois ambushed among the rushes.  Heading the canoe back for the
+south shore, they raced for their lives.  The Iroquois pursued in their
+own boats.  About a mile from the shore, the strength of the fugitives
+fagged.  Knowing that the Iroquois were gaining fast, Radisson threw
+out the loathsome scalps that the Algonquin had persisted in carrying.
+By that strange fatality which seems to follow crime, instead of
+sinking, the hairy scalps floated on the surface of the water back to
+the pursuing Iroquois.  Shouts of rage broke from the warriors.
+Radisson's skiff was so near the south shore that he could see the
+pebbled bottom of the lake; but the water was too deep to wade and too
+clear for a dive, and there was no driftwood to afford hiding.  Then a
+crash of musketry from the Iroquois knocked the bottom out of the
+canoe.  The Algonquin fell dead with two bullet wounds in his head and
+the canoe gradually filled, settled, and sank, with the young Frenchman
+clinging to the cross-bar mute as stone.  Just as it disappeared under
+water, Radisson was seized, and the dead Algonquin was thrown into the
+Mohawk boats.
+
+Radisson alone remained to pay the penalty of a double crime; and he
+might well have prayed for the boat to sink.  The victors shouted their
+triumph.  Hurrying ashore, they kindled a great fire.  They tore the
+heart from the dead Algonquin, transfixed the head on a pike, and cast
+the mutilated body into the flames for those cannibal rites in which
+savages thought they gained courage by eating the flesh of their
+enemies.  Radisson was rifled of clothes and arms, trussed at the
+elbows, roped round the waist, and driven with blows back to the
+canoes.  There were other captives among the Mohawks.  As the canoes
+emerged from the islands, Radisson counted one hundred and fifty
+Iroquois warriors, with two French captives, one white woman, and
+seventeen Hurons.  Flaunting from the canoe prows were the scalps of
+eleven Algonquins.  The victors fired off their muskets and shouted
+defiance until the valley rang.  As the seventy-five canoes turned up
+the Richelieu River for the country of the Iroquois, hope died in the
+captive Hurons and there mingled with the chant of the Mohawks'
+war-songs, the low monotonous dirge of the prisoners:--
+
+  "If I die, I die valiant!
+  I go without fear
+  To that land where brave men
+  Have gone long before me--
+  If I die, I die valiant."
+
+Twelve miles up the Richelieu, the Iroquois landed to camp.  The
+prisoners were pegged out on the sand, elbows trussed to knees, each
+captive tied to a post.  In this fashion they lay every night of
+encampment, tortured by sand-flies that they were powerless to drive
+off.  At the entrance to the Mohawk village, a yoke was fastened to the
+captives' necks by placing pairs of saplings one on each side down the
+line of prisoners.  By the rope round the waist of the foremost
+prisoner, they were led slowly between the lines of tormentors.  The
+captives were ordered to sing.  If one refused or showed fear, a Mohawk
+struck off a finger with a hatchet, or tore the prisoners' nails out,
+or thrust red-hot irons into the muscles of the bound arms.[10]  As
+Radisson appeared, he was recognized with shouts of rage by the friends
+of the murdered Mohawks.  Men, women, and children armed with rods and
+skull-crackers--leather bags loaded with stones--rushed on the slowly
+moving file of prisoners.
+
+"They began to cry from both sides," says Radisson; "we marching one
+after another, environed with people to witness that hideous sight,
+which seriously may be called the image of Hell in this world."
+
+The prisoners moved mournfully on.  The Hurons chanted their death
+dirge.  The Mohawk women uttered screams of mockery.  Suddenly there
+broke from the throng of onlookers the Iroquois family that had adopted
+Radisson.  Pushing through the crew of torturers, the mother caught
+Radisson by the hair, calling him by the name of her dead son, "Orimha!
+Orimha!"  She cut the thongs that bound him to the poles, and wresting
+him free shoved him to her husband, who led Radisson to their own lodge.
+
+"Thou fool," cried the old chief, "thou wast my son!  Thou makest
+thyself an enemy!  Thou lovest us not, though we saved thy life!
+Wouldst kill me, too?"  Then, with a rough push to a mat on the ground,
+"Chagon--now, be merry!  It's a merry business you've got into!  Give
+him something to eat!"
+
+Trembling with fear, young Radisson put as bold a face on as he could
+and made a show of eating what the squaw placed before him.  He was
+still relating his adventures when there came a roar of anger from the
+Mohawks outside, who had discovered his absence from the line.  A
+moment later the rabble broke into the lodge.  Jostling the friendly
+chief aside, the Mohawk warriors carried Radisson back to the orgies of
+the torture.  The prisoners had been taken out of the stocks and placed
+on several scaffoldings.  One poor Frenchman fell to the ground bruised
+and unable to rise.  The Iroquois tore the scalp from his head and
+threw him into the fire.  That was Radisson's first glimpse of what was
+in store for him.  Then he, too, stood on the scaffolding among the
+other prisoners, who never ceased singing their death song.  In the
+midst of these horrors--_diableries_, the Jesuits called them--as if
+the very elements had been moved with pity, there burst over the
+darkened forest a terrific hurricane of hail and rain.  This put out
+the fires and drove all the tormentors away but a few impish children,
+who stayed to pluck nails from the hands and feet of the captives and
+shoot arrows with barbed points at the naked bodies.  Every iniquity
+that cruelty could invent, these children practised on the captives.
+Red-hot spears were brought from the lodge fires and thrust into the
+prisoners.  The mutilated finger ends were ground between stones.
+Thongs were twisted round wrists and ankles, by sticks put through a
+loop, till flesh was cut to the bone.  As the rain ceased falling, a
+woman, who was probably the wife of one of the murdered Mohawks,
+brought her little boy to cut one of Radisson's fingers with a flint
+stone.  The child was too young and ran away from the gruesome task.
+
+Gathering darkness fell over the horrible spectacle.  The exhausted
+captives, some in a delirium from pain, others unconscious, were led to
+separate lodges, or dragged over the ground, and left tied for the
+night.  The next morning all were returned to the scaffolds, but the
+first day had glutted the Iroquois appetite for tortures.  The friendly
+family was permitted to approach Radisson.  The mother brought him food
+and told him that the Council Lodge had decided not to kill him for
+that day--they wanted the young white warrior for their own ranks; but
+even as the cheering hope was uttered, came a brave with a pipe of live
+coals, in which he thrust and held Radisson's thumb.  No sooner had the
+tormentor left than the woman bound up the burn and oiled Radisson's
+wounds.  He suffered no abuse that day till night, when the soles of
+both feet were burned.  The majority of the captives were flung into a
+great bonfire.  On the third day of torture he almost lost his life.
+First came a child to gnaw at his fingers.  Then a man appeared armed
+for the ghastly work of mutilation.  Both these the Iroquois father of
+Radisson sent away.  Once, when none of the friendly family happened to
+be near, Radisson was seized and bound for burning, but by chance the
+lighted faggot scorched his executioner.  A friendly hand slashed the
+thongs that bound him, and he was drawn back to the scaffold.
+
+Past caring whether he lived or died, and in too great agony from the
+burns of his feet to realize where he was going, Radisson was conducted
+to the Great Council.  Sixty old men sat on a circle of mats, smoking,
+round the central fire.  Before them stood seven other captives.
+Radisson only was still bound.  A gust of wind from the opening lodge
+door cleared the smoke for an instant and there entered Radisson's
+Indian father, clad in the regalia of a mighty chief.  Tomahawk and
+calumet and medicine-bag were in his hands.  He took his place in the
+circle of councillors.  Judgment was to be given on the remaining
+prisoners.
+
+After passing the Council Pipe from hand to hand in solemn silence, the
+sachems prepared to give their views.  One arose, and offering the
+smoke of incense to the four winds of heaven to invoke witness to the
+justice of the trial, gave his opinion on the matter of life or death.
+Each of the chiefs in succession spoke.  Without any warning whatever,
+one chief rose and summarily tomahawked three of the captives.  That
+had been the sentence.  The rest were driven, like sheep for the
+shambles, to life-long slavery.
+
+Radisson was left last.  His case was important.  He had sanctioned the
+murder of three Mohawks.  Not for a moment since he was recaptured had
+they dared to untie the hands of so dangerous a prisoner.  Amid deathly
+silence, the Iroquois father stood up.  Flinging down medicine-bag, fur
+robe, wampum belts, and tomahawk, he pointed to the nineteen scars upon
+his side, each of which signified an enemy slain by his own hand.  Then
+the old Mohawk broke into one of those impassioned rhapsodies of
+eloquence which delighted the savage nature, calling back to each of
+the warriors recollection of victories for the Iroquois.  His eyes took
+fire from memory of heroic battle.  The councillors shook off their
+imperturbable gravity and shouted "Ho, ho!"  Each man of them had a
+memory of his part in those past glories.  And as they applauded, there
+glided into the wigwam the mother, singing some battle-song of valor,
+dancing and gesticulating round and round the lodge in dizzy,
+serpentine circlings, that illustrated in pantomime those battles of
+long ago.  Gliding ghostily from the camp-fire to the outer dark, she
+suddenly stopped, stood erect, advanced a step, and with all her might
+threw one belt of priceless wampum at the councillors' feet, one
+necklace over the prisoner's head.
+
+Before the applause could cease or the councillors' ardor cool, the
+adopted brother sprang up, hatchet in hand, and sang of other
+victories.  Then, with a delicacy of etiquette which white pleaders do
+not always observe, father and son withdrew from the Council Lodge to
+let the jury deliberate.  The old sachems were disturbed.  They had
+been moved more than their wont.  Twenty withdrew to confer.  Dusk
+gathered deeper and deeper over the forests of the Mohawk Valley.
+Tawny faces came peering at the doors, waiting for the decision.
+Outsiders tore the skins from the walls of the lodge that they, too,
+might witness the memorable trial of the boy prisoner.  Sachem after
+sachem rose and spoke.  Tobacco was sacrificed to the fire-god.  Would
+the relatives of the dead Mohawks consider the wampum belts full
+compensation?  Could the Iroquois suffer a youth to live who had joined
+the murderers of the Mohawks?  Could the Mohawks afford to offend the
+great Iroquois chief who was the French youth's friend?  As they
+deliberated, the other councillors returned, accompanied by all the
+members of Radisson's friendly family.  Again the father sang and
+spoke.  This time when he finished, instead of sitting down, he caught
+the necklace of wampum from Radisson's neck, threw it at the feet of
+the oldest sachem, cut the captive's bonds, and, amid shouts of
+applause, set the white youth free.
+
+
+One of the incomprehensible things to civilization is how a white man
+_can_ degenerate to savagery.  Young Radisson's life is an
+illustration.  In the first transports of his freedom, with the Mohawk
+women dancing and singing around him, the men shouting, he leaped up,
+oblivious of pain; but when the flush of ecstasy had passed, he sank to
+the mat of the Iroquois lodge, and he was unable to use his burned feet
+for more than a month.  During this time the Iroquois dressed his
+wounds, brought him the choice portions of the hunt, gave him clean
+clothing purchased at Orange (Albany), and attended to his wants as if
+he had been a prince.  No doubt the bright eyes of the swarthy young
+French boy moved to pity the hearts of the Mohawk mothers, and his
+courage had won him favor among the warriors.  He was treated like a
+king.  The women waited upon him like slaves, and the men gave him
+presents of firearms and ammunition--the Indian's most precious
+possessions.  Between flattered vanity and indolence, other white men,
+similarly treated, have lost their self-respect.  Beckworth, of the
+Missouri, became to all intents and purposes a savage; and Bird, of the
+Blackfeet, degenerated lower than the Indians.  Other Frenchmen
+captured from the St. Lawrence, and white women taken from the New
+England colonies, became so enamored of savage life that they refused
+to leave the Indian lodges when peace had liberated them.  Not so
+Radisson.  Though only seventeen, flattered vanity never caused him to
+forget the gratitude he owed the Mohawk family.  Though he relates his
+life with a frankness that leaves nothing untold, he never at any time
+returned treachery for kindness.  The very chivalry of the French
+nature endangered him all the more.  Would he forget his manhood, his
+birthright of a superior race, his inheritance of nobility from a
+family that stood foremost among the _noblesse_ of New France?
+
+[Illustration: Albany, from an Old Print.]
+
+
+The spring of 1653 came with unloosening of the rivers and stirring of
+the forest sap and fret of the warrior blood.  Radisson's Iroquois
+father held great feasts in which he heaved up the hatchet to break the
+kettle of sagamite against all enemies.  Would Radisson go on the
+war-path with the braves, or stay at home with the women and so lose
+the respect of the tribe?  In the hope of coming again within reach of
+Three Rivers, he offered to join the Iroquois in their wars.  The
+Mohawks were delighted with his spirit, but they feared to lose their
+young warrior.  Accepting his offer, they refused to let him accompany
+them to Quebec, but assigned him to a band of young braves, who were to
+raid the border-lands between the Huron country of the Upper Lakes and
+the St. Lawrence.  This was not what Radisson wanted, but he could not
+draw back.  There followed months of wild wanderings round the regions
+of Niagara.  The band of young braves passed dangerous places with
+great precipices and a waterfall, where the river was a mile wide and
+unfrozen.  Radisson was constrained to witness many acts against the
+Eries, which must have one of two effects on white blood,--either turn
+the white man into a complete savage, or disgust him utterly with
+savage life.  Leaving the Mohawk village amid a blare of guns and
+shouts, the young braves on their maiden venture passed successively
+through the lodges of Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas, where
+they were feasted almost to death by the Iroquois Confederacy.[11]
+Then they marched to the vast wilderness of snow-padded forests and
+heaped windfall between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
+
+Snow still lay in great drifts under the shadow of hemlock and spruce;
+and the braves skimmed forward winged with the noiseless speed of
+snow-shoes.  When the snow became too soft from thaw for snow-shoes,
+they paused to build themselves a skiff.  It was too early to peel the
+bark off the birch, so they made themselves a dugout of the walnut
+tree.  The wind changed from north to south, clearing the lakes of ice
+and filling the air with the earthy smells of up-bursting growth.
+"There was such a thawing," writes Radisson, "ye little brookes flowed
+like rivers, which made us embark to wander over that sweet sea."
+Lounging in their skiff all day, carried from shore to shore with the
+waves, and sleeping round camp-fires on the sand each night, the young
+braves luxuriated in all the delights of sunny idleness and spring
+life.  But this was not war.  It was play, and play of the sort that
+weans the white man from civilization to savagery.
+
+One day a scout, who had climbed to the top of a tree, espied two
+strange squaws.  They were of a hostile tribe.  The Mohawk bloodthirst
+was up as a wolf's at the sight of lambs.  In vain Radisson tried to
+save the women by warning the Iroquois that if there were women, there
+must be men, too, who would exact vengeance for the squaws' death.  The
+young braves only laid their plans the more carefully for his warning
+and massacred the entire encampment.  Prisoners were taken, but when
+food became scarce they were brutally knocked on the head.  These
+tribes had never heard guns before, and at the sound of shots fled as
+from diabolical enemies.  It was an easy matter for the young braves in
+the course of a few weeks to take a score of scalps and a dozen
+prisoners.  At one place more than two hundred beaver were trapped.  At
+the end of the raid, the booty was equally divided.  Radisson asked
+that the woman prisoner be given to him; and he saved her from torture
+and death on the return to the Mohawks by presenting her as a slave to
+his Indian mother.  All his other share of booty he gave to the
+friendly family.  The raid was over.  He had failed of his main object
+in joining it.  He had not escaped.  But he had made one important
+gain.  His valor had reestablished the confidence of the Indians so
+that when they went on a free-booting expedition against the whites of
+the Dutch settlements at Orange (Albany), Radisson was taken with them.
+Orange, or Albany, consisted at that time of some fifty thatched
+log-houses surrounded by a settlement of perhaps a hundred and fifty
+farmers.  This raid was bloodless.  The warriors looted the farmers'
+cabins, emptied their cupboards, and drank their beer cellars dry to
+the last drop.  Once more Radisson kept his head.  While the braves
+entered Fort Orange roaring drunk, Radisson was alert and sober.  A
+drunk Indian falls an easy prey in the bartering of pelts.  The
+Iroquois wanted guns.  The Dutch wanted pelts.  The whites treated the
+savages like kings; and the Mohawks marched from house to house
+feasting of the best.  Radisson was dressed in garnished buckskin and
+had been painted like a Mohawk.  Suspecting some design to escape, his
+Iroquois friends never left him.  The young Frenchman now saw white men
+for the first time in almost two years; but the speech that he heard
+was in a strange tongue.  As Radisson went into the fort, he noticed a
+soldier among the Dutch.  At the same instant the soldier recognized
+him as a Frenchman, and oblivious of the Mohawks' presence blurted out
+his discovery in Iroquois dialect, vowing that for all the paint and
+grease, this youth was a white man below.  The fellow's blundering
+might have cost Radisson's life; but the youth had not been a captive
+among crafty Mohawks for nothing.  Radisson feigned surprise at the
+accusation.  That quieted the Mohawk suspicions and they were presently
+deep in the beer pots of the Dutch.  Again the soldier spoke, this time
+in French.  It was the first time that Radisson had heard his native
+tongue for months.  He answered in French.  At that the soldier emitted
+shouts of delight, for he, too, was French, and these strangers in an
+alien land threw their arms about each other like a pair of long-lost
+brothers with exclamations of joy too great for words.
+
+[Illustration: The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time.]
+
+From that moment Radisson became the lion of Fort Orange.  The women
+dragged him to their houses and forced more dainties on him than he
+could eat.  He was conducted from house to house in triumph, to the
+amazed delight of the Indians.  The Dutch offered to ransom him at any
+price; but that would have exposed the Dutch settlement to the
+resentment of the Mohawks and placed Radisson under heavy obligation to
+people who were the enemies of New France.  Besides, his honor was
+pledged to return to his Indian parents; and it was a long way home to
+have to sail to Europe and back again to Quebec.  Perhaps, too, there
+was deep in his heart what he did not realize--a rooted love for the
+wilds that was to follow him all through life.  By the devious course
+of captivity, he had tasted of a new freedom and could not give it up.
+He declined the offer of the Dutch.  In two days he was back among the
+Mohawks ten times more a hero than he had ever been.  Mother and
+sisters were his slaves.
+
+But between love of the wilds and love of barbarism is a wide
+difference.  He had not been back for two weeks when that glimpse of
+crude civilization at Orange recalled torturing memories of the French
+home in Three Rivers.  The filthy food, the smoky lodges, the cruelties
+of the Mohawks, filled him with loathing.  The nature of the white man,
+which had been hidden under the grease and paint of the savage--and in
+danger of total eclipse--now came upper-most.  With Radisson, to think
+was to act.  He determined to escape if it cost him his life.
+
+Taking only a hatchet as if he were going to cut wood, Radisson left
+the Indian lodge early one morning in the fall of 1653.  Once out of
+sight from the village, he broke into a run, following the trail
+through the dense forests of the Mohawk Valley toward Fort Orange.  On
+and on he ran, all that day, without pause to rest or eat, without
+backward glance, with eye ever piercing through the long leafy vistas
+of the forest on the watch for the fresh-chipped bark of the trees that
+guided his course, or the narrow indurated path over the spongy mould
+worn by running warriors.  And when night filled the forest with the
+hoot of owl, and the far, weird cries of wild creatures on the rove,
+there sped through the aisled columns of star light and shadow, the
+ghostly figure of the French boy slim, and lithe as a willow, with
+muscles tense as ironwood, and step silent as the mountain-cat.  All
+that night he ran without a single stop.  Chill daybreak found him
+still staggering on, over rocks slippery with the night frost, over
+windfall tree on tree in a barricade, through brawling mountain brooks
+where his moccasins broke the skim of ice at the edge, past rivers
+where he half waded, half swam.  He was now faint from want of food;
+but fear spurred him on.  The morning air was so cold that he found it
+better to run than rest.  By four of the afternoon he came to a
+clearing in the forest, where was the cabin of a settler.  A man was
+chopping wood.  Radisson ascertained that there were no Iroquois in the
+cabin, and, hiding in it, persuaded the settler to carry a message to
+Fort Orange, two miles farther on.  While he waited Indians passed the
+cabin, singing and shouting.  The settler's wife concealed him behind
+sacks of wheat and put out all lights.  Within an hour came a rescue
+party from Orange, who conducted him safely to the fort.  For three
+days Radisson hid in Orange, while the Mohawks wandered through the
+fort, calling him by name.
+
+Gifts of money from the Jesuit, Poncet, and from a Dutch merchant,
+enabled Radisson to take ship from Orange to New York, and from New
+York to Europe.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in
+Holland.  This view of Fort Amsterdam on the Manhattan is copied from
+an ancient engraving executed in Holland.  The fort was erected in 1623
+but finished upon the above model by Governor Van Twiller in 1635.]
+
+Pere Poncet had been captured by the Mohawks the preceding summer, but
+had escaped to Orange.[12]  Embarking on a small sloop, Radisson sailed
+down the Hudson to New York, which then consisted of some five hundred
+houses, with stores, barracks, a stone church, and a dilapidated fort.
+Central Park was a forest; goats and cows pastured on what is now Wall
+Street; and to east and west was a howling wilderness of marsh and
+woods.  After a stay of three weeks, Radisson embarked for Amsterdam,
+which he reached in January, 1654.
+
+
+[1] Benjamin Sulte in _Chronique Trifluvienne_.
+
+[2] It was in August of this same year, 1652, that the governor of
+Three Rivers was slain by the Iroquois.  Parkman gives this date, 1653,
+Garneau, 1651, L'Abbe Tanguay, 1651; Dollier de Casson, 1651, Belmont,
+1653.  Sulte gives the name of the governor Duplessis-Kerbodot, not
+Bochart, as given in Parkman.
+
+[3] Dr. Bryce has unearthed the fact that in a petition to the House of
+Commons, 1698, Radisson sets down his age as sixty-two.  This gives the
+year of his birth as 1636.  On the other hand, Sulte has record of a
+Pierre Radisson registered at Quebec in 1681, aged fifty-one, which
+would make him slightly older, if it is the same Radisson.  Mr. Sulte's
+explanation is as follows: Sebastien Hayet of St. Malo married Madeline
+Henault.  Their daughter Marguerite married Chouart, known as
+Groseillers.  Madeline Henault then married Pierre Esprit Radisson of
+Paris, whose children were Pierre, our hero, and two daughters.
+
+[4] A despatch from M. Talon in 1666 shows there were 461 families in
+Three Rivers.  State papers from the Minister to M. Frontenac in 1674
+show there were only 6705 French in all the colony.  Averaging five a
+family, there must have been 2000 people at Three Rivers.  Fear of the
+Iroquois must have driven the country people inside the fort, so that
+the population enrolled was larger than the real population of Three
+Rivers.  Sulte gives the normal population of Three Rivers in 1654 as
+38 married couples, 13 bachelors, 38 boys, 26 girls--in all not 200.
+
+[5] At first flush, this seems a slip in _Radisson's Relation_.  Where
+did the Mohawks get their guns?  _New York Colonial Documents_ show
+that between 1640 and 1650 the Dutch at Fort Orange had supplied the
+Mohawks alone with four hundred guns.
+
+[6] One of many instances of Radisson's accuracy in detail.  All tribes
+have a trick of browning food on hot stones or sand that has been taken
+from fire.  The Assiniboines gained their name from this practice: they
+were the users of "boiling stones."
+
+[7] I have asked both natives and old fur-traders what combination of
+sounds in English most closely resembles the Indian war-cry, and they
+have all given the words that I have quoted.  One daughter of a chief
+factor, who went through a six weeks' siege by hostiles in her father's
+fort, gave a still more graphic description.  She said: "you can
+imagine the snarls of a pack of furiously vicious dogs saying 'ah-oh'
+with a whoop, you have it; and you will not forget it!"
+
+[8] This practice was a binding law on many tribes.  Catlin relates it
+of the Mandans, and Hearne of the Chipewyans.  The latter considered it
+a crime to kiss wives and children after a massacre without the bath of
+purification.  Could one know where and when that universal custom of
+washing blood-guilt arose, one mystery of existence would be unlocked.
+
+[9] I have throughout followed Mr. Sulte's correction of the name of
+this governor.  The mistake followed by Parkman, Tanguay, and
+others--it seems--was first made in 1820, and has been faithfully
+copied since.  Elsewhere will be found Mr. Sulte's complete elucidation
+of the hopeless dark in which all writers have involved Radisson's
+family.
+
+[10] If there were not corroborative testimony, one might suspect the
+excited French lad of gross exaggeration in his account of Iroquois
+tortures; but the Jesuits more than confirm the worst that Radisson
+relates.  Bad as these torments were, they were equalled by the deeds
+of white troops from civilized cities in the nineteenth century.  A
+band of Montana scouts came on the body of a comrade horribly mutilated
+by the Indians.  They caught the culprits a few days afterwards.
+Though the government report has no account of what happened, traders
+say the bodies of the guilty Indians were found skinned and scalped by
+the white troops.
+
+[11] Radisson puts the Senecas before the Cayugas, which is different
+from the order given by the Jesuits.
+
+[12] The fact that Radisson confessed his sins to this priest seems
+pretty well to prove that Pierre was a Catholic and not a Protestant,
+as has been so often stated.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+1657-1658
+
+RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE
+
+Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the
+Iroquois Mission--He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the
+Thousand Islands--Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as
+Prisoners of War--Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson.
+
+
+From Amsterdam Radisson took ship to Rochelle.  Here he found himself a
+stranger in his native land.  All his kin of whom there is any
+record--Pierre Radisson, his father, Madeline Henault, his mother,
+Marguerite and Francoise, his elder and younger sisters, his uncle and
+aunt, with their daughter, Elizabeth--were now living at Three Rivers
+in New France.[1]  Embarking with the fishing fleet that yearly left
+France for the Grand Banks, Radisson came early in the spring of 1654
+to Isle Percee at the mouth of the St. Lawrence.  He was still a week's
+journey from Three Rivers, but chance befriended him.  Algonquin canoes
+were on the way up the river to war on the Iroquois.  Joining the
+Indian canoes, he slipped past the hilly shores of the St. Lawrence and
+in five days was between the main bank on the north side and the muddy
+shallows of the Isle of Orleans.  Sheering out where the Montmorency
+roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across
+St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below
+the beetling heights of Cape Diamond, Quebec.
+
+[Illustration: One of the earliest maps of the Great Lakes.]
+
+It was May, 1651, when he had first seen the turrets and spires of
+Quebec glittering on the hillside in the sun; it was May, 1652, that
+the Iroquois had carried him off from Three Rivers; and it was May,
+1654, when he came again to his own.  He was welcomed back as from the
+dead.  Changes had taken place in the interval of his captivity.  A
+truce had been arranged between the Iroquois and the French.  Now that
+the Huron missions had been wiped out by Iroquois wars, the Jesuits
+regarded the truce as a Divine provision for a mission among the
+Iroquois.  The year that Radisson escaped from the Mohawks, Jesuit
+priests had gone among them.  A still greater change that was to affect
+his life more vitally had taken place in the Radisson family.  The year
+that Radisson had been captured, the outraged people of Three Rivers
+had seized a Mohawk chief and burned him to death.  In revenge, the
+Mohawks murdered the governor of Three Rivers and a company of
+Frenchmen.  Among the slain was the husband of Radisson's sister,
+Marguerite.  When Radisson returned, he found that his widowed sister
+had married Medard Chouart Groseillers, a famous fur trader of New
+France, who had passed his youth as a lay helper to the Jesuit missions
+of Lake Huron.[2]  Radisson was now doubly bound to the Jesuits by
+gratitude and family ties.  Never did pagan heart hear an evangel more
+gladly than the Mohawks heard the Jesuits.  The priests were welcomed
+with acclaim, led to the Council Lodge, and presented with belts of
+wampum.  Not a suspicion of foul play seems to have entered the
+Jesuits' mind.  When the Iroquois proposed to incorporate into the
+Confederacy the remnants of the Hurons, the Jesuits discerned nothing
+in the plan but the most excellent means to convert pagan Iroquois by
+Christian Hurons.  Having gained an inch, the Iroquois demanded the
+proverbial ell.  They asked that a French settlement be made in the
+Iroquois country.  The Indians wanted a supply of firearms to war
+against all enemies; and with a French settlement miles away from help,
+the Iroquois could wage what war they pleased against the Algonquins
+without fear of reprisals from Quebec--the settlement of white men
+among hostiles would be hostage of generous treatment from New France.
+Of these designs, neither priests nor governor had the slightest
+suspicion.  The Jesuits were thinking only of the Iroquois' soul; the
+French, of peace with the Iroquois at any cost.
+
+In 1656 Major Dupuis and fifty Frenchmen had established a French
+colony among the Iroquois.[3]  The hardships of these pioneers form no
+part of Radisson's life, and are, therefore, not set down here.  Peace
+not bought by a victory is an unstable foundation for Indian treaty.
+The Mohawks were jealous that their confederates, the Onondagas, had
+obtained the French settlement.  In 1657, eighty Iroquois came to
+Quebec to escort one hundred Huron refugees back to Onondaga for
+adoption into the Confederacy.  These Hurons were Christians, and the
+two Jesuits, Paul Ragueneau and Francois du Peron, were appointed to
+accompany them to their new abode.  Twenty young Frenchmen joined the
+party to seek their fortunes at the new settlement; but a man was
+needed who could speak Iroquois.  Glad to repay his debt to the
+Jesuits, young Radisson volunteered to go as a _donne_, that is, a lay
+helper vowed to gratuitous services.
+
+It was midsummer before all preparations had been made.  On July 26,
+the party of two hundred, made up of twenty Frenchmen, eighty Iroquois,
+and a hundred Hurons, filed out of the gates of Montreal, and winding
+round the foot of the mountain followed a trail through the forest that
+took them past the Lachine Rapids.  The Onondaga _voyageurs_ carried
+the long birch canoes inverted on their shoulders, two Indians at each
+end; and the other Iroquois trotted over the rocks with the Frenchmen's
+baggage on their backs.  The day was hot, the _portage_ long and
+slippery with dank moisture.  The Huron children fagged and fell
+behind.  At nightfall, thirty of the haughty Iroquois lost patience,
+and throwing down their bundles made off for Quebec with the avowed
+purpose of raiding the Algonquins.  On the way, they paused to scalp
+three Frenchmen at Montreal, cynically explaining that if the French
+persisted in taking Algonquins into their arms, the white men need not
+be surprised if the blow aimed at an Algonquin sometimes struck a
+Frenchman.  That act opened the eyes of the French to the real meaning
+of the peace made with the Iroquois; but the little colony was beyond
+recall.  To insure the safety of the French among the Onondagas, the
+French governor at Quebec seized a dozen Iroquois and kept them as
+hostages of good conduct.
+
+Meanwhile, all was confusion on Lake St. Louis, where the last band of
+colonists had encamped.  The Iroquois had cast the Frenchmen's baggage
+on the rocks and refused to carry it farther.  Leaving the whites all
+embarrassed, the Onondagas hurriedly embarked the Hurons and paddled
+quickly out of sight.  The act was too suddenly unanimous not to have
+been premeditated.  Why had the Iroquois carried the Hurons away from
+the Frenchmen?  Father Ragueneau at once suspected some sinister
+purpose.  Taking only a single sack of flour for food, he called for
+volunteers among the twenty Frenchmen to embark in a leaky, old canoe
+and follow the treacherous Onondagas.  Young Radisson was one of the
+first to offer himself.  Six others followed his example; and the seven
+Frenchmen led by the priest struck across the lake, leaving the others
+to gather up the scattered baggage.
+
+The Onondagas were too deep to reveal their plots with seven armed
+Frenchmen in pursuit.  The Indians permitted the French boats to come
+up with the main band.  All camped together in the most friendly
+fashion that night; but the next morning one Iroquois offered passage
+in his canoe to one Frenchman, another Iroquois to another of the
+whites, and by the third day, when they came to Lake St. Francis, the
+old canoe had been abandoned.  The French were scattered promiscuously
+among the Iroquois, with no two whites in one boat.  The Hurons were
+quicker to read the signs of treachery than the French.  There were
+rumors of one hundred Mohawks lying in ambush at the Thousand Islands
+to massacre the coming Hurons.  On the morning of August 3 four Huron
+warriors and two women seized a canoe, and to the great astonishment of
+the encampment launched out before they could be stopped.  Heading the
+canoe back for Montreal, they broke out in a war chant of defiance to
+the Iroquois.
+
+The Onondagas made no sign, but they evidently took council to delay no
+longer.  Again, when they embarked, they allowed no two whites in one
+canoe.  The boats spread out.  Nothing was said to indicate anything
+unusual.  The lake lay like a silver mirror in the August sun.  The
+water was so clear that the Indians frequently paused to spear fish
+lying below on the stones.  At places the canoes skirted close to the
+wood-fringed shore, and braves landed to shoot wild-fowl.  Radisson and
+Ragueneau seemed simultaneously to have noticed the same thing.
+Without any signal, at about four in the afternoon, the Onondagas
+steered their canoes for a wooded island in the middle of the St.
+Lawrence.  With Radisson were three Iroquois and a Huron.  As the canoe
+grated shore, the bowman loaded his musket and sprang into the thicket.
+Naturally, the Huron turned to gaze after the disappearing hunter.
+Instantly, the Onondaga standing directly behind buried his hatchet in
+the Huron's head.  The victim fell quivering across Radisson's feet and
+was hacked to pieces by the other Iroquois.  Not far along the shore
+from Radisson, the priest was landing.  He noticed an Iroquois chief
+approach a Christian Huron girl.  If the Huron had not been a convert,
+she might have saved her life by becoming one of the chief's many
+slaves; but she had repulsed the Onondaga pagan.  As Ragueneau looked,
+the girl fell dead with her skull split by the chief's war-axe.  The
+Hurons on the lake now knew what awaited them; and a cry of terror
+arose from the children.  Then a silence of numb horror settled over
+the incoming canoes.  The women were driven ashore like lambs before
+wolves; but the valiant Hurons would not die without striking one blow
+at their inveterate and treacherous enemies.  They threw themselves
+together back to back, prepared to fight.  For a moment this show of
+resistance drove off the Iroquois.  Then the Onondaga chieftain rushed
+forward, protesting that the two murders had been a personal quarrel.
+Striking back his own warriors with a great show of sincerity, he bade
+the Hurons run for refuge to the top of the hill.  No sooner had the
+Hurons broken rank, than there rushed from the woods scores of
+Iroquois, daubed in war-paint and shouting their war-cry.  This was the
+hunt to which the young braves had dashed from the canoes to be in
+readiness behind the thicket.  Before the scattered Hurons could get
+together for defence, the Onondagas had closed around the hilltop in a
+cordon.  The priest ran here, there, everywhere,--comforting the dying,
+stopping mutilation, defending the women.  All the Hurons were
+massacred but one man, and the bodies were thrown into the river.  With
+blankets drawn over their heads that they might not see, the women
+huddled together, dumb with terror.  When the Onondagas turned toward
+the women, the Frenchmen stood with muskets levelled.  The Onondagas
+halted, conferred, and drew off.
+
+[Illustration: Paddling past Hostiles.]
+
+The fight lasted for four hours.  Darkness and the valor of the little
+French band saved the women for the time.  The Iroquois kindled a fire
+and gathered to celebrate their victory.  Then the old priest took his
+life in his hands.  Borrowing three belts of wampum, he left the
+huddling group of Huron women and Frenchmen and marched boldly into the
+circle of hostiles.  The lives of all the French and Hurons hung by a
+thread.  Ragueneau had been the spiritual guide of the murdered tribe
+for twenty years; and he was now sobbing like a child.  The Iroquois
+regarded his grief with sardonic scorn; but they misjudged the manhood
+below the old priest's tears.  Ragueneau asked leave to speak.  They
+grunted permission.  Springing up, he broke into impassioned, fearless
+reproaches of the Iroquois for their treachery.  Casting one belt of
+wampum at the Onondaga chief's feet, the priest demanded pledges that
+the massacre cease.  A second belt was given to register the Onondaga's
+vow to conduct the women and children safely to the Iroquois country.
+The third belt was for the safety of the French at Onondaga.
+
+The Iroquois were astonished.  They had looked for womanish pleadings.
+They had heard stern demands coupled with fearless threats of
+punishment.  When Ragueneau sat down, the Onondaga chief bestirred
+himself to counteract the priest's powerful impression.  Lounging to
+his feet, the Onondaga impudently declared that the governor of Quebec
+had instigated the massacre.  Ragueneau leaped up with a denial that
+took the lie from the scoundrel's teeth.  The chief sat down abashed.
+The Council grunted "Ho, ho!" accepting the wampum and promising all
+that the Jesuit had asked.
+
+
+Among the Thousand Islands, the French who had remained behind to
+gather up the baggage again joined the Onondagas.  They brought with
+them from the Isle of Massacres a poor Huron woman, whom they had found
+lying insensible on a rock.  During the massacre she had hidden in a
+hollow tree, where she remained for three days.  In this region,
+Radisson almost lost his life by hoisting a blanket sail to his canoe.
+The wind drifted the boat so far out that Radisson had to throw all
+ballast overboard to keep from being swamped.  As they turned from the
+St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario up the Oswego River for Onondaga, they
+met other warriors of the Iroquois nation.  In spite of pledges to the
+priest, the meeting was celebrated by torturing the Huron women to
+entertain the newcomers.  Not the sufferings of the early Christians in
+Rome exceeded the martyrdom of the Christian Hurons among the
+Onondagas.  As her mother mounted the scaffold of tortures, a little
+girl who had been educated by the Ursulines of Quebec broke out with
+loud weeping.  The Huron mother turned calmly to the child:--
+
+"Weep not my death, my little daughter!  We shall this day be in
+heaven," said she; "God will pity us to all eternity.  The Iroquois
+cannot rob us of that."
+
+As the flames crept about her, her voice was heard chanting in the
+crooning monotone of Indian death dirge: "Jesu--have pity on us!
+Jesu--have pity on us!"  The next moment the child was thrown into the
+flames, repeating the same words.
+
+The Iroquois recognized Radisson.  He sent presents to his Mohawk
+parents, who afterwards played an important part in saving the French
+of Onondaga.  Having passed the falls, they came to the French fort
+situated on the crest of a hill above a lake.  Two high towers
+loopholed for musketry occupied the centre of the courtyard.  Double
+walls, trenched between, ran round a space large enough to enable the
+French to keep their cattle inside the fort.  The _voyageurs_ were
+welcomed to Onondaga by Major Dupuis, fifty Frenchmen, and several
+Jesuits.
+
+
+The pilgrims had scarcely settled at Onondaga before signs of the
+dangers that were gathering became too plain for the blind zeal of the
+Jesuits to ignore.  Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas, togged out in
+war-gear, swarmed outside the palisades.  There was no more dissembling
+of hunger for the Jesuits' evangel.  The warriors spoke no more soft
+words, but spent their time feasting, chanting war-songs, heaving up
+the war-hatchet against the kettle of sagamite--which meant the rupture
+of peace.  Then came four hundred Mohawks, who not only shouted their
+war-songs, but built their wigwams before the fort gates and
+established themselves for the winter like a besieging army.  That the
+intent of the entire Confederacy was hostile to Onondaga could not be
+mistaken; but what was holding the Indians back?  Why did they delay
+the massacre?  Then Huron slaves brought word to the besieged fort of
+the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec.  The fort understood what
+stayed the Iroquois blow.  The Confederacy dared not attack the
+isolated fort lest Quebec should take terrible vengeance on the
+hostages.
+
+[Illustration: Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, who was tortured by the
+Mohawks.  From a painting in Chateau de Ramezay, Montreal.]
+
+The French decided to send messengers to Quebec for instructions before
+closing navigation cut them off for the winter.  Thirteen men and one
+Jesuit left the fort the first week of September.  Mohawk spies knew of
+the departure and lay in ambush at each side of the narrow river to
+intercept the party; but the messengers eluded the trap by striking
+through the forests back from the river directly to the St. Lawrence.
+Then the little fort closed its gates and awaited an answer from
+Quebec.  Winter settled over the land, blocking the rivers with ice and
+the forest trails with drifts of snow; but no messengers came back from
+Quebec.  The Mohawks had missed the outgoing scouts: but they caught
+the return coureurs and destroyed the letters.  Not a soul could leave
+the fort but spies dogged his steps.  The Jesuits continued going from
+lodge to lodge, and in this way Onondaga gained vague knowledge of the
+plots outside the fort.  The French could venture out only at the risk
+of their lives, and spent the winter as closely confined as prisoners
+of war.  Of the ten drilled soldiers, nine threatened to desert.  One
+night an unseen hand plunged through the dark, seized the sentry, and
+dragged him from the gate.  The sentry drew his sword and shouted, "To
+arms!"  A band of Frenchmen sallied from the gates with swords and
+muskets.  In the tussle the sentry was rescued, and gifts were sent out
+in the morning to pacify the wounded Mohawks.  Fortunately the besieged
+had plenty of food inside the stockades; but the Iroquois knew there
+could be no escape till the ice broke up in spring, and were quite
+willing to exchange ample supplies of corn for tobacco and firearms.
+The Huron slaves who carried the corn to the fort acted as spies among
+the Mohawks for the French.
+
+In the month of February the vague rumors of conspiracy crystallized
+into terrible reality.  A dying Mohawk confessed to a Jesuit that the
+Iroquois[4] Council had determined to massacre half the company of
+French and to hold the other half till their own Mohawk hostages were
+released from Quebec.  Among the hostiles encamped before the gates was
+Radisson's Indian father.  This Mohawk was still an influential member
+of the Great Council.  He, too, reported that the warriors were bent on
+destroying Onondaga.[5]  What was to be done?  No answer had come from
+Quebec, and no aid could come till the spring.  The rivers were still
+blocked with ice; and there were not sufficient boats in the fort to
+carry fifty men down to Quebec.  "What could we do?" writes Radisson.
+"We were in their hands.  It was as hard to get away from them as for a
+ship in full sea without a pilot."
+
+They at once began constructing two large flat-bottomed boats of light
+enough draft to run the rapids in the flood-tide of spring.  Carpenters
+worked hidden in an attic; but when the timbers were mortised together,
+the boats had to be brought downstairs, where one of the Huron slaves
+caught a glimpse of them.  Boats of such a size he had never before
+seen.  Each was capable of carrying fifteen passengers with full
+complement of baggage.  Spring rains were falling in floods.  The
+convert Huron had heard the Jesuits tell of Noah's ark in the deluge.
+Returning to the Mohawks, he spread a terrifying report of an impending
+flood and of strange arks of refuge built by the white men.  Emissaries
+were appointed to visit the French fort; but the garrison had been
+forewarned.  Radisson knew of the coming spies from his Indian father;
+and the Jesuits had learned of the Council from their converts.  Before
+the spies arrived, the French had built a floor over their flatboats,
+and to cover the fresh floor had heaped up a dozen canoes.  The spies
+left the fort satisfied that neither a deluge nor an escape was
+impending.  Birch canoes would be crushed like egg-shells if they were
+run through the ice jams of spring floods.  Certain that their victims
+were trapped, the Iroquois were in no haste to assault a double-walled
+fort, where musketry could mow them down as they rushed the hilltop.
+The Indian is bravest under cover; so the Mohawks spread themselves in
+ambush on each side of the narrow river and placed guards at the falls
+where any boats must be _portaged_.
+
+Of what good were the boats?  To allay suspicion of escape, the Jesuits
+continued to visit the wigwams.[6]  The French were in despair.  They
+consulted Radisson, who could go among the Mohawks as with a charmed
+life, and who knew the customs of the Confederacy so well.  Radisson
+proposed a way to outwit the savages.  With this plan the priests had
+nothing to do.  To the harum-scarum Radisson belong the sole credit and
+discredit of the escapade.  On his device hung the lives of fifty
+innocent men.  These men must either escape or be massacred.  Of
+bloodshed, Radisson had already seen too much; and the youth of
+twenty-one now no more proposed to stickle over the means of victory
+than generals who wear the Victoria cross stop to stickle over means
+to-day.
+
+Radisson knew that the Indians had implicit faith in dreams; so
+Radisson had a dream.[7]  He realized as critics of Indian customs fail
+to understand that the fearful privations of savage life teach the
+crime of waste.  The Indian will eat the last morsel of food set before
+him if he dies for it.  He believes that the gods punish waste of food
+by famine.  The belief is a religious principle and the
+feasts--_festins a tout manger_--are a religious act; so Radisson
+dreamed--whether sleeping or waking--that the white men were to give a
+great festival to the Iroquois.  This dream he related to his Indian
+father.  The Indian like his white brother can clothe a vice under
+religious mantle.  The Iroquois were gluttonous on a religious
+principle.  Radisson's dream was greeted with joy.  _Coureurs_ ran
+through the forest, bidding the Mohawks to the feast.  Leaving ambush
+of forest and waterfall, the warriors hastened to the walls of
+Onondaga.  To whet their appetite, they were kept waiting outside for
+two whole days.  The French took turns in entertaining the waiting
+guests.  Boisterous games, songs, dances, and music kept the Iroquois
+awake and hilarious to the evening of the second day.  Inside the fort
+bedlam reigned.  Boats were dragged from floors to a sally-port at the
+rear of the courtyard.  Here firearms, ammunition, food, and baggage
+were placed in readiness.  Guns which could not be taken were burned or
+broken.  Ammunition was scattered in the snow.  All the stock but one
+solitary pig, a few chickens, and the dogs was sacrificed for the
+feast, and in the barracks a score of men were laboring over enormous
+kettles of meat.  Had an Indian spy climbed to the top of a tree and
+looked over the palisades, all would have been discovered; but the
+French entertainers outside kept their guests busy.
+
+[Illustration: Chateau de Ramezay, Montreal, for years the residence of
+the governor, and later the storehouse of the fur companies.]
+
+On the evening of the second day a great fire was kindled in the outer
+enclosure, between the two walls.  The trumpets blew a deafening blast.
+The Mohawks answered with a shout.  The French clapped their hands.
+The outer gates were thrown wide open, and in trooped several hundred
+Mohawk warriors, seating themselves in a circle round the fire.
+Another blare of trumpets, and twelve enormous kettles of mincemeat
+were carried round the circle of guests.  A Mohawk chief rose solemnly
+and gave his deities of earth, air, and fire profuse thanks for having
+brought such generous people as the French among the Iroquois.  Other
+chiefs arose and declaimed to their hearers that earth did not contain
+such hosts as the French.  Before they had finished speaking there came
+a second and a third and a fourth relay of kettles round the circle of
+feasters.  Not one Iroquois dared to refuse the food heaped before him.
+By the time the kettles of salted fowl and venison and bear had passed
+round the circle, each Indian was glancing furtively sideways to see if
+his neighbor could still eat.  He who was compelled to forsake the
+feast first was to become the butt of the company.  All the while the
+French kept up a din of drums and trumpets and flageolets, dancing and
+singing and shouting to drive off sleep.  The eyes of the gorging
+Indians began to roll.  Never had they attempted to demolish such a
+banquet.  Some shook their heads and drew back.  Others fell over in
+the dead sleep that results from long fasting and overfeeding and fresh
+air.  Radisson was everywhere, urging the Iroquois to "Cheer up! cheer
+up!  If sleep overcomes you, you must awake!  Beat the drum!  Blow the
+trumpet!  Cheer up!  Cheer up!"
+
+But the end of the repulsive scene was at hand.  By midnight the
+Indians had--in the language of the white man--"gone under the
+mahogany."  They lay sprawled on the ground in sodden sleep.  Perhaps,
+too, something had been dropped in the fleshpots to make their sleep
+the sounder.  Radisson does not say no, neither does the priest, and
+they two were the only whites present who have written of the
+episode.[8]  But the French would hardly have been human if they had
+not assured their own safety by drugging the feasters.  It was a common
+thing for the fur traders of a later period to prevent massacre and
+quell riot by administering a quietus to Indians with a few drops of
+laudanum.
+
+The French now retired to the inner court.  The main gate was bolted
+and chained.  Through the loophole of this gate ran a rope attached to
+a bell that was used to summon the sentry.  To this rope the
+mischievous Radisson tied the only remaining pig, so that when the
+Indians would pull the rope for admission, the noise of the disturbed
+pig would give the impression of a sentry's tramp-tramp on parade.
+Stuffed effigies of soldiers were then stuck about the barracks.  If a
+spy climbed up to look over the palisades, he would see Frenchmen still
+in the fort.  While Radisson was busy with these precautions to delay
+pursuit, the soldiers and priests, led by Major Dupuis, had broken open
+the sally-port, forced the boats through sideways, and launched out on
+the river.  Speaking in whispers, they stowed the baggage in the
+flat-boats, then brought out skiffs--dugouts to withstand the ice
+jam--for the rest of the company.  The night was raw and cold.  A skim
+of ice had formed on the margins of the river.  Through the pitchy
+darkness fell a sleet of rain and snow that washed out the footsteps of
+the fugitives.  The current of mid-river ran a noisy mill-race of ice
+and log drift; and the _voyageurs_ could not see one boat length ahead.
+
+To men living in savagery come temptations that can neither be measured
+nor judged by civilization.  To the French at Onondaga came such a
+temptation now.  Their priests were busy launching the boats.  The
+departing soldiers seemed simultaneously to have become conscious of a
+very black suggestion.  Cooped up against the outer wall in the dead
+sleep of torpid gluttony lay the leading warriors of the Iroquois
+nation.  Were these not the assassins of countless Frenchmen, the
+murderers of women, the torturers of children?  Had Providence not
+placed the treacherous Iroquois in the hands of fifty Frenchmen?  If
+these warriors were slain, it would be an easy matter to march to the
+villages of the Confederacy, kill the old men, and take prisoners the
+women.  New France would be forever free of her most deadly enemy.
+Like the Indians, the white men were trying to justify a wrong under
+pretence of good.  By chance, word of the conspiracy was carried to the
+Jesuits.  With all the authority of the church, the priests forbade the
+crime.  "Their answer was," relates Radisson, "that they were sent to
+instruct in the faith of Jesus Christ and not to destroy, and that the
+cross must be their sword."
+
+Locking the sally-port, the company--as the Jesuit father
+records--"shook the dust of Onondaga from their feet," launched out on
+the swift-flowing, dark river and escaped "as the children of Israel
+escaped by night from the land of Egypt."  They had not gone far
+through the darkness before the roar of waters told them of a cataract
+ahead.  They were four hours carrying baggage and boats over this
+_portage_.  Sleet beat upon their backs.  The rocks were slippery with
+glazed ice; and through the rotten, half-thawed snow, the men sank to
+mid-waist.  Navigation became worse on Lake Ontario; for the wind
+tossed the lake like a sea, and ice had whirled against the St.
+Lawrence in a jam.  On the St. Lawrence, they had to wait for the
+current to carry the ice out.  At places they cut a passage through the
+honeycombed ice with their hatchets, and again they were compelled to
+_portage_ over the ice.  The water was so high that the rapids were
+safely ridden by all the boats but one, which was shipwrecked, and
+three of the men were drowned.
+
+They had left Onondaga on the 20th of March, 1658.  On the evening of
+April 3d they came to Montreal, where they learned that New France had
+all winter suffered intolerable insolence from the Iroquois, lest
+punishment of the hostiles should endanger the French at Onondaga.  The
+fleeing colonists waited twelve days at Montreal for the ice to clear,
+and were again held back by a jam at Three Rivers; but on April 23 they
+moored safely under the heights of Quebec.
+
+_Coureurs_ from Onondaga brought word that the Mohawks had been
+deceived by the pig and the ringing bell and the effigies for more than
+a week.  Crowing came from the chicken yard, dogs bayed in their
+kennels, and when a Mohawk pulled the bell at the gate, he could hear
+the sentry's measured march.  At the end of seven days not a white man
+had come from the fort.  At first the Mohawks had thought the "black
+robes" were at prayers; but now suspicions of trickery flashed on the
+Iroquois.  Warriors climbed the palisades and found the fort empty.
+Two hundred Mohawks set out in pursuit; but the bad weather held them
+back.  And that was the way Radisson saved Onondaga.[9]
+
+
+[1] The uncle, Pierre Esprit Radisson, is the one with whom careless
+writers have confused the young hero, owing to identity of name.
+Madeline Henault has been described as the explorer's first wife,
+notwithstanding genealogical impossibilities which make the explorer's
+daughter thirty-six years old before he was seventeen.  Even the
+infallible Tanguay trips on Radisson's genealogy.  I have before me the
+complete record of the family taken from the parish registers of Three
+Rivers and Quebec, by the indefatigable Mr. Sulte, whose explanation of
+the case is this: that Radisson's mother, Madeline Henault, first
+married Sebastien Hayet, of St. Malo, to whom was born Marguerite about
+1630; that her second husband was Pierre Esprit Radisson of Paris, to
+whom were born our hero and the sisters Francoise and Elizabeth.
+
+[2] I have throughout referred to Medard Chouart, Sieur des
+Groseillers, as simply "Groseillers," because that is the name
+referring to him most commonly used in the _State Papers_ and old
+histories.  He was from Charly-Saint-Cyr, near Meaux, and is supposed
+to have been born about 1621.  His first wife was Helen Martin,
+daughter of Abraham Martin, who gave his name to the Plains of Abraham.
+
+[3] This is the story of Onondaga which Parkman has told.
+Unfortunately, when Parkman's account was written, _Radisson's
+Journals_ were unknown and Mr. Parkman had to rely entirely on the
+_Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_ and the _Jesuit Relations_.  After
+the discovery of _Radisson's Journals_, Parkman added a footnote to his
+account of Onondaga, _quoting_ Radisson in confirmation.  If Radisson
+may be quoted to corroborate Parkman, Radisson may surely be accepted
+as authentic.  At the same time, I have compared this journal with
+Father Ragueneau's of the same party, and the two tally in every detail.
+
+[4] See _Jesuit Relations_, 1657-1658.
+
+[5] _Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_.
+
+[6] See Ragueneau's account.
+
+[7] See _Marie de l'Incarnation_ and Dr. Dionne's modern monograph.
+
+[8] This account is drawn mainly from _Radisson's Journal_, partly from
+Father Ragueneau, and in one detail from a letter of _Marie de
+l'Incarnation_.  Garneau says the feasters were drugged, but I cannot
+find his authority for this, though from my knowledge of fur traders'
+escapes, I fancy it would hardly have been human nature not to add a
+sleeping potion to the kettles.
+
+[9] The _festins a tout manger_ must not be too sweepingly condemned by
+the self-righteous white man as long as drinking bouts are a part of
+civilized customs; and at least one civilized nation has the gross
+proverb, "Better burst than waste."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+1658-1660
+
+RADISSON'S THIRD VOYAGE
+
+The Discovery of the Great Northwest--Radisson and his Brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, visit what are now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and the
+Canadian Northwest--Radisson's Prophecy on first beholding the
+West--Twelve Years before Marquette and Jolliet, Radisson sees the
+Mississippi--The Terrible Remains of Dollard's Fight seen on the Way
+down the Ottawa--Why Radisson's Explorations have been ignored
+
+
+While Radisson was among the Iroquois, the little world of New France
+had not been asleep.  Before Radisson was born, Jean Nicolet of Three
+Rivers had passed westward through the straits of Mackinaw and coasted
+down Lake Michigan as far as Green Bay.[1]  Some years later the great
+Jesuit martyr, Jogues, had preached to the Indians of Sault Ste. Marie;
+but beyond the Sault was an unknown world that beckoned the young
+adventurers of New France as with the hands of a siren.  Of the great
+beyond--known to-day as the Great Northwest--nothing had been learned
+but this: from it came the priceless stores of beaver pelts yearly
+brought down the Ottawa to Three Rivers by the Algonquins, and in it
+dwelt strange, wild races whose territory extended northwest and north
+to unknown nameless seas.
+
+The Great Beyond held the two things most coveted by ambitious young
+men of New France,--quick wealth by means of the fur trade and the
+immortal fame of being a first explorer.  Nicolet had gone only as far
+as Green Bay and Fox River; Jogues not far beyond the Sault.  What
+secrets lay in the Great Unknown?  Year after year young Frenchmen,
+fired with the zeal of the explorer, joined wandering tribes of
+Algonquins going up the Ottawa, in the hope of being taken beyond the
+Sault.  In August, 1656, there came from Green Bay two young Frenchmen
+with fifty canoes of Algonquins, who told of far-distant waters called
+Lake "Ouinipeg," and tribes of wandering hunters called "Christinos"
+(Crees), who spent their winters in a land bare of trees (the prairie),
+and their summers on the North Sea (Hudson's Bay).  They also told of
+other tribes, who were great warriors, living to the south,--these were
+the Sioux.  But the two Frenchmen had not gone beyond the Great
+Lakes.[2]  These Algonquins were received at Chateau St. Louis, Quebec,
+with pompous firing of cannon and other demonstrations of welcome.  So
+eager were the French to take possession of the new land that thirty
+young men equipped themselves to go back with the Indians; and the
+Jesuits sent out two priests, Leonard Gareau and Gabriel Dreuillettes,
+with a lay helper, Louis Boesme.  The sixty canoes left Quebec with
+more firing of guns for a God-speed; but at Lake St. Peter the Mohawks
+ambushed the flotilla.  The enterprise of exploring the Great Beyond
+was abandoned by all the French but two.  Gareau, who was mortally
+wounded on the Ottawa, probably by a Frenchman or renegade hunter, died
+at Montreal; and Dreuillettes did not go farther than Lake Nipissing.
+Here, Dreuillettes learned much of the Unknown from an old Nipissing
+chief.  He heard of six overland routes to the bay of the North, whence
+came such store of peltry.[3]  He, too, like the two Frenchmen from
+Green Bay, heard of wandering tribes who had no settled lodge like the
+Hurons and Iroquois, but lived by the chase,--Crees and Sioux and
+Assiniboines of the prairie, at constant war round a lake called
+"Ouinipegouek."
+
+[Illustration: A Cree brave, with the wampum string.]
+
+By one of those curious coincidences of destiny which mark the lives of
+nations and men, the young Frenchman who had gone with the Jesuit,
+Dreuillettes, to Lake Nipissing when the other Frenchmen turned back,
+was Medard Chouart Groseillers, the fur trader married to Radisson's
+widowed sister, Marguerite.[4]
+
+When Radisson came back from Onondaga, he found his brother-in-law,
+Groseillers, at Three Rivers, with ambitious designs of exploration in
+the unknown land of which he had heard at Green Bay and on Lake
+Nipissing.  Jacques Cartier had discovered only one great river, had
+laid the foundations of only one small province; Champlain had only
+made the circuit of the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Great Lakes;
+but here was a country--if the Indians spoke the truth--greater than
+all the empires of Europe together, a country bounded only by three
+great seas, the Sea of the North, the Sea of the South, and the Sea of
+Japan, a country so vast as to stagger the utmost conception of little
+New France.
+
+It was unnecessary for Groseillers to say more.  The ambition of young
+Radisson took fire.  Long ago, when a captive among the Mohawks, he had
+cherished boyish dreams that it was to be his "destiny to discover many
+wild nations"; and here was that destiny opening the door for him,
+pointing the way, beckoning to the toils and dangers and glories of the
+discoverer's life.  Radisson had been tortured among the Mohawks and
+besieged among the Onondagas.  Groseillers had been among the Huron
+missions that were destroyed and among the Algonquin canoes that were
+attacked.  Both explorers knew what perils awaited them; but what
+youthful blood ever chilled at prospect of danger when a single _coup_
+might win both wealth and fame?  Radisson had not been home one month;
+but he had no sooner heard the plan than he "longed to see himself in a
+boat."
+
+A hundred and fifty Algonquins had come down the Ottawa from the Great
+Beyond shortly after Radisson returned from Onondaga.  Six of these
+Algonquins had brought their furs to Three Rivers.  Some emissaries had
+gone to Quebec to meet the governor; but the majority of the Indians
+remained at Montreal to avoid the ambuscade of the Mohawks on Lake St.
+Peter.  Radisson and Groseillers were not the only Frenchmen conspiring
+to wrest fame and fortune from the Upper Country.  When the Indians
+came back from Quebec, they were accompanied by thirty young French
+adventurers, gay as boys out of school or gold hunters before the first
+check to their plans.  There were also two Jesuits sent out to win the
+new domain for the cross.[5]  As ignorant as children of the hardships
+ahead, the other treasure-seekers kept up nonchalant boasting that
+roused the irony of such seasoned men as Radisson and Groseillers.
+"What fairer bastion than a good tongue," Radisson demands cynically,
+"especially when one sees his own chimney smoke? . . .  It is different
+when food is wanting, work necessary day and night, sleep taken on the
+bare ground or to mid-waist in water, with an empty stomach, weariness
+in the bones, and bad weather overhead."
+
+Giving the slip to their noisy companions, Radisson and Groseillers
+stole out from Three Rivers late one night in June, accompanied by
+Algonquin guides.  Travelling only at night to avoid Iroquois spies,
+they came to Montreal in three days.  Here were gathered one hundred
+and forty Indians from the Upper Country, the thirty French, and the
+two priests.  No gun was fired at Montreal, lest the Mohawks should get
+wind of the departure; and the flotilla of sixty canoes spread over
+Lake St. Louis for the far venture of the _Pays d'en Haut_.  Three days
+of work had silenced the boasting of the gay adventurers; and the
+_voyageurs_, white and red, were now paddling in swift silence.  Safety
+engendered carelessness.  As the fleet seemed to be safe from Iroquois
+ambush, the canoes began to scatter.  Some loitered behind.  Hunters
+went ashore to shoot.  The hills began to ring with shot and call.  At
+the first _portage_ many of the canoes were nine and ten miles apart.
+Enemies could have set on the Algonquins in some narrow defile and
+slaughtered the entire company like sheep in a pen.  Radisson and
+Groseillers warned the Indians of the risk they were running.  Many of
+these Algonquins had never before possessed firearms.  With the muskets
+obtained in trade at Three Rivers, they thought themselves invincible
+and laughed all warning to scorn.  Radisson and Groseillers were told
+that they were a pair of timid squaws; and the canoes spread apart till
+not twenty were within call.  As they skirted the wooded shores, a man
+suddenly dashed from the forest with an upraised war-hatchet in one
+hand and a blanket streaming from his shoulders.  He shouted for them
+to come to him.  The Algonquins were panic-stricken.  Was the man
+pursued by Mohawks, or laying a trap to lure them within shooting
+range?  Seeing them hesitate, the Indian threw down blanket and hatchet
+to signify that he was defenceless, and rushed into the water to his
+armpits.
+
+"I would save you," he shouted in Iroquois.
+
+The Algonquins did not understand.  They only knew that he spoke the
+tongue of the hated enemy and was unarmed.  In a trice, the Algonquins
+in the nearest canoe had thrown out a well-aimed lasso, roped the man
+round the waist, and drawn him a captive into the canoe.
+
+"Brothers," protested the captive, who seems to have been either a
+Huron slave or an Iroquois magician, "your enemies are spread up and
+down!  Sleep not!  They have heard your noise!  They wait for you!
+They are sure of their prey!  Believe me--keep together!  Spend not
+your powder in vain to frighten your enemies by noise!  See that the
+stones of your arrows be not bent!  Bend your bows!  Keep your hatchets
+sharp!  Build a fort!  Make haste!"
+
+But the Algonquins, intoxicated with the new power of firearms, would
+hear no warning.  They did not understand his words and refused to heed
+Radisson's interpretation.  Beating paddles on their canoes and firing
+off guns, they shouted derisively that the man was "a dog and a hen."
+All the same, they did not land to encamp that night, but slept in
+midstream, with their boats tied to the rushes or on the lee side of
+floating trees.  The French lost heart.  If this were the beginning,
+what of the end?  Daylight had scarcely broken when the paddles of the
+eager _voyageurs_ were cutting the thick gray mist that rose from the
+river to get away from observation while the fog still hid the fleet.
+From afar came the dull, heavy rumble of a waterfall.[6]
+
+There was a rush of the twelve foremost canoes to reach the landing and
+cross the _portage_ before the thinning mist lifted entirely.  Twelve
+boats had got ashore when the fog was cleft by a tremendous crashing of
+guns, and Iroquois ambushed in the bordering forest let go a salute of
+musketry.  Everything was instantly in confusion.  Abandoning their
+baggage to the enemy, the Algonquins and French rushed for the woods to
+erect a barricade.  This would protect the landing of the other canoes.
+The Iroquois immediately threw up a defence of fallen logs likewise,
+and each canoe that came ashore was greeted with a cross fire between
+the two barricades.  Four canoes were destroyed and thirteen of the
+Indians from the Upper Country killed.  As day wore on, the Iroquois'
+shots ceased, and the Algonquins celebrated the truce by killing and
+devouring all the prisoners they had taken, among whom was the magician
+who had given them warning.  Radisson and Groseillers wondered if the
+Iroquois were reserving their powder for a night raid.  The Algonquins
+did not wait to know.  As soon as darkness fell, there was a wild
+scramble for the shore.  A long, low trumpet call, such as hunters use,
+signalled the Algonquins to rally and rush for the boats.  The French
+embarked as best they could.  The Indians swam and paddled for the
+opposite shore of the river.  Here, in the dark, hurried council was
+taken.  The most of the baggage had been lost.  The Indians refused to
+help either the Jesuits or the French, and it was impossible for the
+white _voyageurs_ to keep up the pace in the dash across an unknown
+_portage_ through the dark.  The French adventurers turned back for
+Montreal.  Of the white men, Radisson and Groseillers alone went on.
+
+Frightened into their senses by the encounter, the Algonquins now
+travelled only at night till they were far beyond range of the
+Iroquois.  All day the fugitive band lay hidden in the woods.  They
+could not hunt, lest Mohawk spies might hear the gunshots.  Provisions
+dwindled.  In a short time the food consisted of _tripe de roche_--a
+greenish moss boiled into a soup--and the few fish that might be caught
+during hurried nightly launch or morning landing.  Sometimes they hid
+in a berry patch, when the fruit was gathered and boiled, but
+camp-fires were stamped out and covered.  Turning westward, they
+crossed the barren region of iron-capped rocks and dwarf growth between
+the Upper Ottawa and the Great Lakes.  Now they were farther from the
+Iroquois, and staved off famine by shooting an occasional bear in the
+berry patches.  For a thousand miles they had travelled against stream,
+carrying their boats across sixty _portages_.  Now they glided with the
+current westward to Lake Nipissing.  On the lake, the Upper Indians
+always _cached_ provisions.  Fish, otter, and beaver were plentiful;
+but again they refrained from using firearms, for Iroquois footprints
+had been found on the sand.
+
+From Lake Nipissing they passed to Lake Huron, where the fleet divided.
+Radisson and Groseillers went with the Indians, who crossed Lake Huron
+for Green Bay on Lake Michigan.  The birch canoes could not venture
+across the lake in storms; so the boats rounded southward, keeping
+along the shore of Georgian Bay.  Cedar forests clustered down the
+sandy reaches of the lake.  Rivers dark as cathedral aisles rolled
+their brown tides through the woods to the blue waters of Lake Huron.
+At one point Groseillers recognized the site of the ruined Jesuit
+missions.  The Indians waited the chance of a fair day, and paddled
+over to the straits at the entrance to Lake Michigan.  At Manitoulin
+Island were Huron refugees, among whom were, doubtless, the waiting
+families of the Indians with Radisson.  All struck south for Green Bay.
+So far Radisson and Groseillers had travelled over beaten ground.  Now
+they were at the gateway of the Great Beyond, where no white man had
+yet gone.
+
+The first thing done on taking up winter quarters on Green Bay was to
+appease the friends of those warriors slain by the Mohawks.  A
+distribution of gifts had barely dried up the tears of mourning when
+news came of Iroquois on the war-path.  Radisson did not wait for fear
+to unman the Algonquin warriors.  Before making winter camp, he offered
+to lead a band of volunteers against the marauders.  For two days he
+followed vague tracks through the autumn-tinted forests.  Here were
+markings of the dead leaves turned freshly up; there a moccasin print
+on the sand; and now the ashes of a hidden camp-fire lying in almost
+imperceptible powder on fallen logs told where the Mohawks had
+bivouacked.  On the third day Radisson caught the ambushed band
+unprepared, and fell upon the Iroquois so furiously that not one
+escaped.
+
+After that the Indians of the Upper Country could not do too much for
+the white men.  Radisson and Groseillers were conducted from camp to
+camp in triumph.  Feasts were held.  Ambassadors went ahead with gifts
+from the Frenchmen; and companies of women marched to meet the
+explorers, chanting songs of welcome.  "But our mind was not to stay
+here," relates Radisson, "but to know the remotest people; and, because
+we had been willing to die in their defence, these Indians consented to
+conduct us."
+
+Before the opening of spring, 1659, Radisson and Groseillers had been
+guided across what is now Wisconsin to "a mighty river, great, rushing,
+profound, and comparable to the St. Lawrence." [7]  On the shores of
+the river they found a vast nation--"the people of the fire," prairie
+tribes, a branch of the Sioux, who received them well.[8]  This river
+was undoubtedly the Upper Mississippi, now for the first time seen by
+white men.  Radisson and Groseillers had discovered the Great
+Northwest.[9]  They were standing on the threshold of the Great Beyond.
+They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed,
+not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a
+short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories.
+They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,--illimitable reaches of
+prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open
+meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon.  They saw a land
+waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire
+waiting for the nation builders.
+
+[Illustration: An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux.]
+
+What were Radisson's thoughts?  Did he realize the importance of his
+discovery?  Could he have the vaguest premonition that he had opened a
+door of escape from stifled older lands to a higher type of manhood and
+freedom than the most sanguine dreamer had ever hoped?[10]  After an
+act has come to fruition, it is easy to read into the actor's mind
+fuller purpose than he could have intended.  Columbus could not have
+realized to what the discovery of America would lead.  Did Radisson
+realize what the discovery of the Great Northwest meant?
+
+Here is what he says, in that curious medley of idioms which so often
+results when a speaker knows many languages but is master of none:--
+
+"The country was so pleasant, so beautiful, and so fruitful, that it
+grieved me to see that the world could not discover such inticing
+countries to live in.  This, I say, because the Europeans fight for a
+rock in the sea against one another, or for a steril land . . .  where
+the people by changement of air engender sickness and die. . . .
+Contrariwise, these kingdoms are so delicious and under so temperate a
+climate, plentiful of all things, and the earth brings forth its fruit
+twice a year, that the people live long and lusty and wise in their
+way.  What a conquest would this be, at little or no cost?  What
+pleasure should people have . . . instead of misery and poverty!  Why
+should not men reap of the love of God here?  Surely, more is to be
+gained converting souls here than in differences of creed, when wrongs
+are committed under pretence of religion! . . .  It is true, I
+confess, . . . that access here is difficult . . . but nothing is to be
+gained without labor and pains." [11]
+
+[Illustration: Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in
+Montreal by Mr. McNab.  The date on the picture is 1669.]
+
+Here Radisson foreshadows all the best gains that the West has
+accomplished for the human race.  What are they?  Mainly room,--room to
+live and room for opportunity; equal chances for all classes, high and
+low; plenty for all classes, high and low; the conquests not of war but
+of peace.  The question arises,--when Radisson discovered the Great
+Northwest ten years before Marquette and Jolliet, twenty years before
+La Salle, a hundred years before De la Verendrye, why has his name been
+slurred over and left in oblivion?[12]  The reasons are plain.
+Radisson was a Christian, but he was not a slave to any creed.  Such
+liberality did not commend itself to the annalists of an age that was
+still rioting in a very carnival of religious persecution.  Radisson
+always invoked the blessing of Heaven on his enterprises and rendered
+thanks for his victories; but he was indifferent as to whether he was
+acting as lay helper with the Jesuits, or allied to the Huguenots of
+London and Boston.  His discoveries were too important to be ignored by
+the missionaries.  They related his discoveries, but refrained from
+mentioning his name, though twice referring to Groseillers.  What hurt
+Radisson's fame even more than his indifference to creeds was his
+indifference to nationality.  Like Columbus, he had little care what
+flag floated at the prow, provided only that the prow pushed on and on
+and on,--into the Unknown.  He sold his services alternately to France
+and England till he had offended both governments; and, in addition to
+withstanding a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Church, his
+fame encountered the ill-will of state historians.  He is mentioned as
+"the adventurer," "the hang-dog," "the renegade."  Only in 1885, when
+the manuscript of his travels was rescued from oblivion, did it become
+evident that history must be rewritten.  Here was a man whose
+discoveries were second only to those of Columbus, and whose
+explorations were more far-ranging and important than those of
+Champlain and La Salle and De la Verendrye put together.
+
+
+The spring of 1659 found the explorers still among the prairie tribes
+of the Mississippi.  From these people Radisson learned of four other
+races occupying vast, undiscovered countries.  He heard of the Sioux, a
+warlike nation to the west, who had no fixed abode but lived by the
+chase and were at constant war with another nomadic tribe to the
+north--the Crees.  The Crees spent the summer time round the shores of
+salt water, and in winter came inland to hunt.  Between these two was a
+third,--the Assiniboines,--who used earthen pots for cooking, heated
+their food by throwing hot stones in water, and dressed themselves in
+buckskin.  These three tribes were wandering hunters; but the people of
+the fire told Radisson of yet another nation, who lived in villages
+like the Iroquois, on "a great river that divided itself in two," and
+was called "the Forked River," because "it had two branches, the one
+toward the west, the other toward the south, . . . toward Mexico."
+These people were the Mandans or Omahas, or Iowas, or other people of
+the Missouri.[13]
+
+A whole world of discoveries lay before them.  In what direction should
+they go?  "We desired not to go to the north till we had made a
+discovery in the south," explains Radisson.  The people of the fire
+refused to accompany the explorers farther; so the two "put themselves
+in hazard," as Radisson relates, and set out alone.  They must have
+struck across the height of land between the Mississippi and the
+Missouri; for Radisson records that they met several nations having
+villages, "all amazed to see us and very civil.  The farther we
+sojourned, the delightfuller the land became.  I can say that in all my
+lifetime I have never seen a finer country, for all that I have been in
+Italy.  The people have very long hair.  They reap twice a year.  They
+war against the Sioux and the Cree. . . .  It was very hot there. . . .
+Being among the people they told us . . . of men that built great
+cabins and have beards and have knives like the French."  The Indians
+showed Radisson a string of beads only used by Europeans.  These people
+must have been the Spaniards of the south.  The tribes on the Missouri
+were large men of well-formed figures.  There were no deformities among
+the people.  Radisson saw corn and pumpkins in their gardens.  "Their
+arrows were not of stone, but of fish bones. . . .  Their dishes were
+made of wood. . . .  They had great calumets of red and green
+stone . . . and great store of tobacco. . . .  They had a kind of drink
+that made them mad for a whole day." [14]  "We had not yet seen the
+Sioux," relates Radisson.  "We went toward the south and came back by
+the north."  The _Jesuit Relations_ are more explicit.  Written the
+year that Radisson returned to Quebec, they state: "Continuing their
+wanderings, our two young Frenchmen visited the Sioux, where they found
+five thousand warriors.  They then left this nation for another warlike
+people, who with bows and arrows had rendered themselves redoubtable."
+These were the Crees, with whom, say the Jesuits, wood is so rare and
+small that nature has taught them to make fire of a kind of coal and to
+cover their cabins with skins of the chase.  The explorers seem to have
+spent the summer hunting antelope, buffalo, moose, and wild turkey.
+The Sioux received them cordially, supplied them with food, and gave
+them an escort to the next encampments.  They had set out southwest to
+the Mascoutins, Mandans, and perhaps, also, the Omahas.  They were now
+circling back northeastward toward the Sault between Lake Michigan and
+Lake Superior.  How far westward had they gone?  Only two facts gave
+any clew.  Radisson reports that mountains lay far inland; and the
+Jesuits record that the explorers were among tribes that used coal.
+This must have been a country far west of the Mandans and Mascoutins
+and within sight of at least the Bad Lands, or that stretch of rough
+country between the prairie and outlying foothills of the Rockies.[15]
+The course of the first exploration seems to have circled over the
+territory now known as Wisconsin, perhaps eastern Iowa and Nebraska,
+South Dakota, Montana, and back over North Dakota and Minnesota to the
+north shore of Lake Superior.  "The lake toward the north is full of
+rocks, yet great ships can ride in it without danger," writes Radisson.
+At the Sault they found the Crees and Sautaux in bitter war.  They also
+heard of a French establishment, and going to visit it found that the
+Jesuits had established a mission.
+
+Radisson had explored the Southwest.  He now decided to essay the
+Northwest.  When the Sautaux were at war with the Crees, he met the
+Crees and heard of the great salt sea in the north.  Surely this was
+the Sea of the North--Hudson Bay--of which the Nipissing chief had told
+Groseillers long ago.  Then the Crees had great store of beaver pelts;
+and trade must not be forgotten.  No sooner had peace been arranged
+between Sautaux and Crees, than Cree hunters flocked out of the
+northern forests to winter on Lake Superior.  A rumor of Iroquois on
+the war-path compelled Radisson and Groseillers to move their camp back
+from Lake Superior higher up the chain of lakes and rivers between what
+is now Minnesota and Canada, toward the country of the Sioux.  In the
+fall of 1659 Groseillers' health began to fail from the hardships; so
+he remained in camp for the winter, attending to the trade, while
+Radisson carried on the explorations alone.
+
+This was one of the coldest winters known in Canada.[16]  The snow fell
+so heavily in the thick pine woods of Minnesota that Radisson says the
+forest became as sombre as a cellar.  The colder the weather the better
+the fur, and, presenting gifts to insure safe conduct, Radisson set out
+with a band of one hundred and fifty Cree hunters for the Northwest.
+They travelled on snow-shoes, hunting moose on the way and sleeping at
+night round a camp-fire under the stars.  League after league, with no
+sound through the deathly white forest but the soft crunch-crunch of
+the snowshoes, they travelled two hundred miles toward what is now
+Manitoba.  When they had set out, the snow was like a cushion.  Now it
+began to melt in the spring sun, and clogged the snow-shoes till it was
+almost impossible to travel.  In the morning the surface was glazed
+ice, and they could march without snow-shoes.  Spring thaw called a
+halt to their exploration.  The Crees encamped for three weeks to build
+boats.  As soon as the ice cleared, the band launched back down-stream
+for the appointed rendezvous on Green Bay.  All that Radisson learned
+on this trip was that the Bay of the North lay much farther from Lake
+Superior than the old Nipissing chief had told Dreuillettes and
+Groseillers.[17]
+
+Groseillers had all in readiness to depart for Quebec; and five hundred
+Indians from the Upper Country had come together to go down the Ottawa
+and St. Lawrence with the explorers.  As they were about to embark,
+_coureurs_ came in from the woods with news that more than a thousand
+Iroquois were on the war-path, boasting that they would exterminate the
+French.[18]  Somewhere along the Ottawa a small band of Hurons had been
+massacred.  The Indians with Groseillers and Radisson were terrified.
+A council of the elders was called.
+
+"Brothers, why are ye so foolish as to put yourselves in the hands of
+those that wait for you?" demanded an old chief, addressing the two
+white men.  "The Iroquois will destroy you and carry you away captive.
+Will you have your brethren, that love you, slain?  Who will baptize
+our children?"  (Radisson and Groseillers had baptized more than two
+hundred children.[19])  "Stay till next year!  Then you may freely go!
+Our mothers will send their children to be taught in the way of the
+Lord!"
+
+Fear is like fire.  It must be taken in the beginning, or it spreads.
+The explorers retired, decided on a course of action, and requested the
+Indians to meet them in council a second time.  Eight hundred warriors
+assembled, seating themselves in a circle.  Radisson and Groseillers
+took their station in the centre.[20]
+
+"Who am I?" demanded Groseillers, hotly.  "Am I a foe or a friend?  If
+a foe, why did you suffer me to live?  If a friend, listen what I say!
+You know that we risked our lives for you!  If we have no courage, why
+did you not tell us?  If you have more wit than we, why did you not use
+it to defend yourselves against the Iroquois?  How can you defend your
+wives and children unless you get arms from the French!"
+
+"Fools," cried Radisson, striking a beaver skin across an Indian's
+shoulder, "will you fight the Iroquois with beaver pelts?  Do you not
+know the French way?  We fight with guns, not robes.  The Iroquois will
+coop you up here till you have used all your powder, and then despatch
+you with ease!  Shall your children be slaves because you are cowards?
+Do what you will!  For my part I choose to die like a man rather than
+live like a beggar.  Take back your beaver robes.  We can live without
+you--" and the white men strode out from the council.
+
+Consternation reigned among the Indians.  There was an uproar of
+argument.  For six days the fate of the white men hung fire.  Finally
+the chiefs sent word that the five hundred young warriors would go to
+Quebec with the white men.  Radisson did not give their ardor time to
+cool.  They embarked at once.  The fleet of canoes crossed the head of
+the lakes and came to the Upper Ottawa without adventure.  Scouts went
+ahead to all the _portages_, and great care was taken to avoid an
+ambush when passing overland.  Below the Chaudiere Falls the scouts
+reported that four Iroquois boats had crossed the river.  Again
+Radisson did not give time for fear.  He sent the lightest boats in
+pursuit; and while keeping the enemy thus engaged with half his own
+company on guard at the ends of the long _portage_, he hurriedly got
+cargoes and canoes across the landing.  The Iroquois had fled.  By that
+Radisson knew they were weak.  Somewhere along the Long Sault Rapids,
+the scouts saw sixteen Iroquois canoes.  The Indians would have thrown
+down their goods and fled, but Radisson instantly got his forces in
+hand and held them with a grip of steel.  Distributing loaded muskets
+to the bravest warriors, he pursued the Iroquois with a picked company
+of Hurons, Algonquins, Sautaux, and Sioux.  Beating their paddles,
+Radisson's company shouted the war-cry till the hills rang; but all the
+warriors were careful not to waste an ounce of powder till within
+hitting range.  The Iroquois were not used to this sort of defence.
+They fled.  The Long Sault was always the most dangerous part of the
+Ottawa.  Radisson kept scouts to rear and fore, but the Iroquois had
+deserted their boats and were hanging on the flanks of the company to
+attempt an ambush.  It was apparent that a fort had been erected at the
+foot of the rapids.  Leaving half the band in their boats, Radisson
+marched overland with two hundred warriors.  Iroquois shots spattered
+from each side; but the Huron muskets kept the assailants at a
+distance, and those of Radisson's warriors who had not guns were armed
+with bows and arrows, and wore a shield of buffalo skin dried hard as
+metal.  The Iroquois rushed for the barricade at the foot of the Sault.
+Five of them were picked off as they ran.  For a moment the Iroquois
+were out of cover, and their weakness was betrayed.  They had only one
+hundred and fifty men, while Radisson had five hundred; but the odds
+would not long be in his favor.  Ammunition was running out, and the
+enemy must be dislodged without wasting a shot.  Radisson called back
+encouragement to his followers.  They answered with a shout.  Tying the
+beaver pelts in great bundles, the Indians rolled the fur in front
+nearer and nearer the Iroquois boats, keeping under shelter from the
+shots of the fort.  The Iroquois must either lose their boats and be
+cut off from escape, or retire from the fort.  It was not necessary for
+Radisson's warriors to fire a shot.  Abandoning even their baggage and
+glad to get off with their lives, the Iroquois dashed to save their
+boats.
+
+[Illustration: Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River.]
+
+A terrible spectacle awaited Radisson inside the enclosure of the
+palisades.[21]  The scalps of dead Indians flaunted from the pickets.
+Not a tree but was spattered with bullet marks as with bird shot.  Here
+and there burnt holes gaped in the stockades like wounds.  Outside
+along the river bank lay the charred bones of captives who had been
+burned.  The scarred fort told its own tale.  Here refugees had been
+penned up by the Iroquois till thirst and starvation did their work.
+In the clay a hole had been dug for water by the parched victims, and
+the ooze through the mud eagerly scooped up.  Only when he reached
+Montreal did Radisson learn the story of the dismantled fort.  The
+rumor carried to the explorers on Lake Michigan of a thousand Iroquois
+going on the war-path to exterminate the French had been only too true.
+Half the warriors were to assault Quebec, half to come down on Montreal
+from the Ottawa.  One thing only could save the French--to keep the
+bands apart.  Those on the Ottawa had been hunting all winter and must
+necessarily be short of powder.  To intercept them, a gallant band of
+seventeen French, four Algonquins, and sixty Hurons led by Dollard took
+their stand at the Long Sault.  The French and their Indian allies were
+boiling their kettles when two hundred Iroquois broke from the woods.
+There was no time to build a fort.  Leaving their food, Dollard and his
+men threw themselves into the rude palisades which Indians had erected
+the previous year.  The Iroquois kept up a constant fire and sent for
+reinforcements of six hundred warriors, who were on the Richelieu.  In
+defiance the Indians fighting for the French sallied out, scalped the
+fallen Iroquois, and hoisted the sanguinary trophies on long poles
+above the pickets.  The enraged Iroquois redoubled their fury.  The
+fort was too small to admit all the Hurons; and when the Iroquois came
+up from the Richelieu with Huron renegades among their warriors, the
+Hurons deserted their French allies and went over in a body to the
+enemy.  For two days the French had fought against two hundred
+Iroquois.  For five more days they fought against eight hundred.  "The
+worst of it was," relates Radisson, "the French had no water, as we
+plainly saw; for they had made a hole in the ground out of which they
+could get but little because the fort was on a hill.  It was pitiable.
+There was not a tree but what was shot with bullets.  The Iroquois had
+rushed to make a breach (in the wall). . . . The French set fire to a
+barrel of powder to drive the Iroquois back . . . but it fell inside
+the fort. . . . Upon this, the Iroquois entered . . . so that not one
+of the French escaped. . . .  It was terrible . . . for we came there
+eight days after the defeat." [22]
+
+Without a doubt it was Dollard's splendid fight that put fear in the
+hearts of the Iroquois who fled before Radisson.  The passage to
+Montreal was clear.  The boats ran the rapids without unloading; but
+Groseillers almost lost his life.  His canoe caught on a rock in
+midstream, but righting herself shot down safely to the landing with no
+greater loss than a damaged keel.  The next day, after two years'
+absence, Radisson and Groseillers arrived at Montreal.  A brief stop
+was made at Three Rivers for rest till twenty citizens had fitted out
+two shallops with cannon to escort the discoverers in fitting pomp to
+Quebec.  As the fleet of canoes glided round Cape Diamond, battery and
+bastion thundered a welcome.  Welcome they were, and thrice welcome;
+for so ceaseless had been the Iroquois wars that the three French ships
+lying at anchor would have returned to France without a single beaver
+skin if the explorers had not come.  Citizens shouted from the terraced
+heights of Chateau St. Louis, and bells rang out the joy of all New
+France over the discoverers' return.  For a week Radisson and
+Groseillers were feted.  Viscomte d'Argenson, the new governor,
+presented them with gifts and sent two brigantines to carry them home
+to Three Rivers.  There they rested for the remainder of the year,
+Groseillers at his seigniory with his wife, Marguerite; Radisson, under
+the parental roof.[23]
+
+
+[1] Mr. Benjamin Sulte establishes this date as 1634.
+
+[2] See _Jesuit Relations_, 1656-57-58.  I have purposely refrained
+from entering into the heated controversy as to the identity of these
+two men.  It is apart from the subject, as there is no proof these men
+went beyond the Green Bay region.
+
+[3] These routes were; (1) By the Saguenay, (2) by Three Rivers and the
+St. Maurice, (3) by Lake Nipissing, (4) by Lake Huron, through the land
+of the Sautaux, (5) by Lake Superior overland, (6) by the Ottawa.  See
+_Jesuit Relations_ for detailed accounts of these routes.  Dreuillettes
+went farther west to the Crees a few years later, but that does not
+concern this narrative.
+
+[4] The dispute as to whether eastern Minnesota was discovered on the
+1654-55-56 trip, and whether Groseillers discovered it, is a point for
+savants, but will, I think, remain an unsettled dispute.
+
+[5] The _Relations_ do not give the names of these two Jesuits,
+probably owing to the fact that the enterprise failed.  They simply
+state that two priests set out, but were compelled to remain behind
+owing to the caprice of the savages.
+
+[6] Whether they were now on the Ottawa or the St. Lawrence, it is
+impossible to tell.  Dr. Dionne thinks that the band went overland from
+Lake Ontario to Lake Huron.  I know both waters--Lake Ontario and the
+Ottawa--from many trips, and I think Radisson's description here
+tallies with his other descriptions of the Ottawa.  It is certain that
+they must have been on the Ottawa before they came to the Lake of the
+Castors or Nipissing.  The noise of the waterfall seems to point to the
+Chaudiere Falls of the Ottawa.  If so, the landing place would be the
+tongue of land running out from Hull, opposite the city of Ottawa, and
+the _portage_ would be the Aylmer Road beyond the rapids above the
+falls.  Mr. Benjamin Sulte, the scholarly historian, thinks they went
+by way of the Ottawa, not Lake Ontario, as the St. Lawrence route was
+not used till 1702.
+
+[7] _Jesuit Relations_, 1660.
+
+[8] _Jesuit Relations_, 1660, and _Radisson's Journal_.  These "people
+of the fire," or Mascoutins, were in three regions, (1) Wisconsin, (2)
+Nebraska, (3) on the Missouri.  See Appendix E.
+
+[9] Benjamin Sulte unequivocally states that the river was the
+Mississippi.  Of writers contemporaneous with Radisson, the Jesuits,
+Marie de l'Incarnation, and Charlevoix corroborate Radisson's account.
+In the face of this, what are we to think of modern writers with a
+reputation to lose, who brush Radisson's exploits aside as a possible
+fabrication?  The only conclusion is that they have not read his
+_Journal_.
+
+[10] I refer to Radisson alone, because for half the time in 1659
+Groseillers was ill at the lake, and we cannot be sure that he
+accompanied Radisson in all the journeys south and west, though
+Radisson generously always includes him as "we."  Besides, Groseillers
+seems to have attended to the trading, Radisson to the exploring.
+
+[11] If any one cares to render Radisson's peculiar jumble of French,
+English, Italian, and Indian idioms into more intelligent form, they
+may try their hand at it.  His meaning is quite clear; but the words
+are a medley.  The passage is to be found on pp. 150-151, of the
+_Prince Society Reprint_.  See also _Jesuit Relations_, 1660.
+
+[12] It will be noted that what I claim for Radisson is the honor of
+discovering the Great Northwest, and refrain from trying to identify
+his movements with the modern place names of certain states.  I have
+done this intentionally--though it would have been easy to advance
+opinions about Green Bay, Fox River, and the Wisconsin, and so become
+involved in the childish quarrel that has split the western historical
+societies and obscured the main issue of Radisson's feat.  Needless to
+say, the world does not care whether Radisson went by way of the
+Menominee, or snow-shoed across country.  The question is: Did he reach
+the Mississippi Valley before Marquette and Jolliet and La Salle?  That
+question this chapter answers.
+
+[13] I have refrained from quoting Radisson's names for the different
+Indian tribes because it would only be "caviare to the general."  If
+Radisson's manuscript be consulted it will be seen that the crucial
+point is the whereabouts of the Mascoutins--or people of the fire.
+Reference to the last part of Appendix E will show that these people
+extended far beyond the Wisconsin to the Missouri.  It is ignorance of
+this fact that has created such bitter and childish controversy about
+the exact direction taken by Radisson west-north-west of the
+Mascoutins.  The exact words of the document in the Marine Department
+are; "In the lower Missipy there are several other nations very
+numerous with whom we have no commerce who are trading yet with nobody.
+Above Missoury river which is in the Mississippi below the river
+Illinois, to the south, there are the Mascoutins, Nadoessioux (Sioux)
+with whom we trade and who are numerous."  Benjamin Sulte was one of
+the first to discover that the Mascoutins had been in Nebraska, though
+he does not attempt to trace this part of Radisson's journey definitely.
+
+[14] The entire account of the people on "the Forked River" is so exact
+an account of the Mandans that it might be a page from Catlin's
+descriptions two centuries later.  The long hair, the two crops a year,
+the tobacco, the soap-stone calumets, the stationary villages, the
+knowledge of the Spaniards, the warm climate--all point to a region far
+south of the Northern States, to which so many historians have stupidly
+and with almost wilful ignorance insisted on limiting Radisson's
+travels.  Parkman has been thoroughly honest in the matter.  His _La
+Salle_ had been written before the discovery of the _Radisson
+Journals_; but in subsequent editions he acknowledges in a footnote
+that Radisson had been to "the Forked River."  Other writers (with the
+exception of five) have been content to quote from Radisson's enemies
+instead of going directly to his journals.  Even Garneau slurs over
+Radisson's explorations; but Garneau, too, wrote before the discovery
+of the Radisson papers.  Abbe Tanguay, who is almost infallible on
+French-Canadian matters, slips up on Radisson, because his writings
+preceded the publication of the _Radisson Relations_.  The five writers
+who have attempted to redeem Radisson's memory from ignominy are: Dr.
+N. E. Dionne, of the Parliamentary Library, Quebec; Mr. Justice
+Prudhomme, of St. Boniface, Manitoba; Dr. George Bryce, of Winnepeg,
+Mr. Benjamin Sulte, of Ottawa; and Judge J. V. Brower, of St. Paul.  It
+ever a monument be erected to Radisson--as one certainly ought in every
+province and state west of the Great Lakes--the names of these four
+champions should be engraved upon it.
+
+[15] This claim will, I know, stagger preconceived ideas.  In the light
+of only Radisson's narrative, the third voyage has usually been
+identified with Wisconsin and Minnesota; but in the light of the
+_Jesuit Relations_, written the year that Radisson returned, to what
+tribes could the descriptions apply?  Even Parkman's footnote
+acknowledged that Radisson was among the people of the Missouri.  Grant
+that, and the question arises, What people on the Missouri answer the
+description?  The Indians of the far west use not only coal for fire,
+but raw galena to make bullets for their guns.  In fact, it was that
+practice of the tribes of Idaho that led prospectors to find the Blue
+Bell Mine of Kootenay.  Granting that the Jesuit account--which was of
+course, from hearsay--mistook the use of turf, dry grass, or buffalo
+refuse for a kind of coal, the fact remains that only the very far
+western tribes had this custom.
+
+[16] _Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_.
+
+[17] _Jesuit Relations_, 1658.
+
+[18] See Marie de l'Incarnation, Dollier de Casson, and Abbe Belmont.
+
+[19] _Jesuit Relations_, 1660.
+
+[20] It may be well to state as nearly as possible exactly _what_
+tribes Radisson had met in this trip.  Those rejoined on the way up at
+Manitoulin Island were refugee Hurons and Ottawas.  From the Hurons,
+Ottawas, and Algonquins of Green Bay, Radisson went west with
+Pottowatomies, from them to the Escotecke or Sioux of the Fire, namely
+a branch of the Mascoutins.  From these Wisconsin Mascoutins, he learns
+of the Nadoneceroron, or Sioux proper, and of the Christinos or Crees.
+Going west with the Mascoutins, he comes to "sedentary" tribes.  Are
+these the Mandans?  He compares this country to Italy.  From them he
+hears of white men, that he thinks may be Spaniards.  This tribe is at
+bitter war with Sioux and Crees.  At Green Bay he hears of the Sautaux
+in war with Crees.  His description of buffalo hunts among the Sioux
+tallies exactly with the Pembina hunts of a later day.  Oldmixon says
+that it was from Crees and Assiniboines visiting at Green Bay that
+Radisson learned of a way overland to the great game country of Hudson
+Bay.
+
+[21] There is a mistake in Radisson's account here, which is easily
+checked by contemporaneous accounts of Marie de l'Incarnation and
+Dollier de Casson.  Radisson describes Dollard's fight during his
+fourth trip in 1664, when it is quite plain that he means 1660.  The
+fight has been so thoroughly described by Mr. Parkman, who drew his
+material from the two authorities mentioned, and the _Jesuit Relations_
+that I do not give it in detail.  I give a brief account of Radisson's
+description of the tragedy.
+
+[22] It will be noticed that Radisson's account of the battle at the
+Long Sault--which I have given in his own words as far as
+possible--differs in details from the only other accounts written by
+contemporaries; namely, Marie de l'Incarnation, Dollier de Casson, the
+Abbe Belmont, and the Jesuits.  All these must have written from
+hearsay, for they were at Quebec and Montreal.  Radisson was on the
+spot a week after the tragedy; so that his account may be supposed to
+be as accurate as any.
+
+[23] Mr. Benjamin Sulte states that the explorers wintered on Green
+Bay, 1658-1659, then visited the tribes between Milwaukee and the river
+Wisconsin in the spring of 1659.  Here they learn of the Sioux and the
+Crees.  They push southwest first, where they see the Mississippi
+between April and July, 1659.  Thence they come back to the Sault.
+Then they winter, 1659-1660, among the Sioux.  I have not attempted to
+give the dates of the itinerary; because it would be a matter of
+speculation open to contradiction; but if we accept Radisson's account
+at all--and that account is corroborated by writers contemporaneous
+with him--we must then accept _his_ account of _where_ he went, and not
+the casual guesses of modern writers who have given his journal one
+hurried reading, and then sat down, without consulting documents
+contemporaneous with Radisson, to inform the world of _where_ he went.
+Because this is such a very sore point with two or three western
+historical societies, I beg to state the reasons why I have set down
+Radisson's itinerary as much farther west than has been generally
+believed, though how far west he went does not efface the main and
+essential fact _that Radisson was the true discoverer of the Great
+Northwest_.  For that, let us give him a belated credit and not obscure
+the feat by disputes.  (1) The term "Forked River" referred to the
+Missouri and Mississippi, not the Wisconsin and Mississippi.  (2) No
+other rivers in that region are to be compared to the Ottawa and St.
+Lawrence but the Missouri and Mississippi.  (3) The Mascoutins, or
+People of the Fire, among whom Radisson found himself when he descended
+the Wisconsin from Green Bay, conducted him westward only as far as the
+tribes allied to them, the Mascoutins of the Missouri or Nebraska.
+Hence, Radisson going west-north-west to the Sioux--as he says he
+did--must have skirted much farther west than Wisconsin and Minnesota.
+(4) His descriptions of the Indians who knew tribes in trade with the
+Spaniards must refer to the Indians south of the Big Bend of the
+Missouri.  (5) His description of the climate refers to the same
+region.  (6) The _Jesuit Relations_ confirm beyond all doubt that he
+was among the main body of the great Sioux Confederacy.  (7) Both his
+and the Jesuit reference is to the treeless prairie, which does not
+apply to the wooded lake regions of eastern Minnesota or northern
+Wisconsin.
+
+To me, it is simply astounding--and that is putting it mildly--that any
+one pretending to have read _Radisson's Journal_ can accuse him of
+"claiming" to have "descended to the salt sea" (Gulf of Mexico).
+Radisson makes no such claim; and to accuse him of such is like
+building a straw enemy for the sake of knocking him down, or stirring
+up muddy waters to make them look deep.  The exact words of Radisson's
+narrative are: "We went into ye great river that divides itself in 2,
+where the hurrons with some Ottauake . . . had retired. . . .  This
+nation have warrs against those of the Forked River . . . so called
+because it has 1 branches the one towards the west, the other towards
+the South, wch. we believe runns towards Mexico, by the tokens they
+gave us . . . they told us the prisoners they take tells them that they
+have warrs against a nation . . . that have great beards and such
+knives as we have" . . . etc., etc., etc. . . . "which made us believe
+they were Europeans."  This statement is _no_ claim that Radisson went
+to Mexico, but only that he met tribes who knew tribes trading with
+Spaniards of Mexico.  And yet, on the careless reading of this
+statement, one historian brands Radisson as a liar for "having claimed
+he went to Mexico."  The thing would be comical in its impudence if it
+were not that many such misrepresentations of what Radisson wrote have
+dimmed the glory of his real achievements.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+1661-1664
+
+RADISSON'S FOURTH VOYAGE
+
+The Success of the Explorers arouses Envy--It becomes known that they
+have heard of the Famous Sea of the North--When they ask Permission to
+resume their Explorations, the French Governor refuses except on
+Condition of receiving Half the Profits--In Defiance, the Explorers
+steal off at Midnight--They return with a Fortune and are driven from
+New France
+
+
+Radisson was not yet twenty-six years of age, and his explorations of
+the Great Northwest had won him both fame and fortune.  As Spain sought
+gold in the New Word, so France sought precious furs.  Furs were the
+only possible means of wealth to the French colony, and for ten years
+the fur trade had languished owing to the Iroquois wars.  For a year
+after the migration of the Hurons to Onondaga, not a single beaver skin
+was brought to Montreal.  Then began the annual visits of the Indians
+from the Upper Country to the forts of the St. Lawrence.  Sweeping down
+the northern rivers like wild-fowl, in far-spread, desultory flocks,
+came the Indians of the _Pays d'en Haut_.  Down the Ottawa to Montreal,
+down the St. Maurice to Three Rivers, down the Saguenay and round to
+Quebec, came the treasure-craft,--light fleets of birch canoes laden to
+the water-line with beaver skins.  Whence came the wealth that revived
+the languishing trade of New France?  From a vague, far Eldorado
+somewhere round a sea in the North.  Hudson had discovered this sea
+half a century before Radisson's day; Jean Bourdon, a Frenchman, had
+coasted up Labrador in 1657 seeking the Bay of the North; and on their
+last trip the explorers had learned from the Crees who came through the
+dense forests of the hinterland that there lay round this Bay of the
+North a vast country with untold wealth of furs.  The discovery of a
+route overland to the north sea was to become the lodestar of
+Radisson's life.[1]
+
+[Illustration: Montreal in 1760: 1, the St. Lawrence; 20, the Dock;
+18-19, Arsenal; 16, the Church; 13-15, the Convent and Hospital; 8-12,
+Sally-ports, River Side; 17, Cannon and Wall; 3-4-5, Houses on Island.]
+
+"We considered whether to reveal what we had learned," explains
+Radisson, "for we had _not_ been in the Bay of the North, knowing only
+what the Crees told us.  We wished to discover it ourselves and have
+assurance before revealing anything."  But the secret leaked out.
+Either Groseillers told his wife, or the Jesuits got wind of the news
+from the Indians; for it was announced from Quebec that two priests,
+young La Valliere, the son of the governor at Three Rivers, six other
+Frenchmen, and some Indians would set out for the Bay of the North up
+the Saguenay.  Radisson was invited to join the company as a guide.
+Needless to say that a man who had already discovered the Great
+Northwest and knew the secret of the road to the North, refused to play
+a second part among amateur explorers.  Radisson promptly declined.
+Nevertheless, in May, 1661, the Jesuits, Gabriel Dreuillettes and
+Claude Dablon, accompanied by Couture, La Valliere, and three others,
+set out with Indian guides for the discovery of Hudson's Bay by land.
+On June 1 they began to ascend the Saguenay, pressing through vast
+solitudes below the sombre precipices of the river.  The rapids were
+frequent, the heat was terrific, and the _portages_ arduous.  Owing to
+the obstinacy of the guides, the French were stopped north of Lake St.
+John.  Here the priests established a mission, and messengers were sent
+to Quebec for instructions.
+
+Meanwhile, Radisson and Groseillers saw that no time must be lost.  If
+they would be first in the North, as they had been first in the West,
+they must set out at once.  Two Indian guides from the Upper Country
+chanced to be in Montreal.  Groseillers secured them by bringing both
+to Three Rivers.  Then the explorers formally applied to the French
+governor, D'Avaugour, for permission to go on the voyage of discovery.
+New France regulated the fur trade by license.  Imprisonment, the
+galleys for life, even death on a second offence, were the punishments
+of those who traded without a license.  The governor's answer revealed
+the real animus behind his enthusiasm for discovery.  He would give the
+explorers a license if they would share half the profits of the trip
+with him and take along two of his servants as auditors of the returns.
+One can imagine the indignation of the dauntless explorers at this
+answer.  Their cargo of furs the preceding year had saved New France
+from bankruptcy.  Offering to venture their lives a second time for the
+extension of the French domain, they were told they might do so if they
+would share half the profits with an avaricious governor.  Their answer
+was characteristic.  Discoverers were greater than governors; still, if
+the Indians of the Upper Country invited his Excellency, Radisson and
+Groseillers would be glad to have the honor of his company; as for his
+servants--men who went on voyages of discovery had to act as both
+masters and servants.
+
+D'Avaugour was furious.  He issued orders forbidding the explorers to
+leave Three Rivers without his express permission.  Radisson and
+Groseillers knew the penalties of ignoring this order.  They asked the
+Jesuits to intercede for them.  Though Gareau had been slain trying to
+ascend the Ottawa and Father Menard had by this time preached in the
+forests of Lake Michigan, the Jesuits had made no great discoveries in
+the Northwest.  All they got for their intercessions was a snub.[2]
+
+While messages were still passing between the governor and the
+explorers, there swept down the St. Lawrence to Three Rivers seven
+canoes of Indians from the Upper Country, asking for Radisson and
+Groseillers.  The explorers were honorable to a degree.  They notified
+the governor of Quebec that they intended to embark with the Indians.
+D'Avaugour stubbornly ordered the Indians to await the return of his
+party from the Saguenay.  The Indians made off to hide in the rushes of
+Lake St. Peter.  The sympathy of Three Rivers was with the explorers.
+Late one night in August Radisson and Groseillers--who was captain of
+the soldiers and carried the keys of the fort--slipped out from the
+gates, with a third Frenchman called Lariviere.  As they stepped into
+their canoe, the sentry demanded, "Who goes?"  "Groseillers," came the
+answer through the dark.  "God give you a good voyage, sir," called the
+sentry, faithful to his captain rather than the governor.
+
+The skiff pushed out on the lapping tide.  A bend in the river--and the
+lights of the fort glimmering in long lines across the water had
+vanished behind.  The prow of Radisson's boat was once more heading
+upstream for the Unknown.  Paddling with all swiftness through the
+dark, the three Frenchmen had come to the rushes of Lake St. Peter
+before daybreak.  No Indians could be found.  Men of softer mettle
+might have turned back.  Not so Radisson.  "We were well-armed and had
+a good boat," he relates, "so we resolved to paddle day and night to
+overtake the Indians."  At the west end of the lake they came up with
+the north-bound canoes.  For three days and nights they pushed on
+without rest.  Naturally, Radisson did not pause to report progress at
+Montreal.  Game was so plentiful in the surrounding forests that
+Iroquois hunters were always abroad in the regions of the St. Lawrence
+and Ottawa.[3]  Once they heard guns.  Turning a bend in the river,
+they discovered five Iroquois boats, just in time to avoid them.  That
+night the Frenchman, Lariviere, dreamed that he had been captured by
+the Mohawks, and he shouted out in such terror that the alarmed Indians
+rushed to embark.  The next day they again came on the trail of
+Iroquois.  The frightened Indians from the Upper Country shouldered
+their canoes and dashed through the woods.  Lariviere could not keep up
+and was afraid to go back from the river lest he should lose his
+bearings.  Fighting his way over windfall and rock, he sank exhausted
+and fell asleep.  Far ahead of the Iroquois boats the Upper Country
+Indians came together again.  The Frenchman was nowhere to be found.
+It was dark.  The Indians would not wait to search.  Radisson and
+Groseillers dared not turn back to face the irate governor.  Lariviere
+was abandoned.  Two weeks afterwards some French hunters found him
+lying on the rocks almost dead from starvation.  He was sent back to
+Three Rivers, where D'Avaugour had him imprisoned.  This outrage the
+inhabitants of Three Rivers resented.  They forced the jail and rescued
+Lariviere.
+
+Three days after the loss of Lariviere Radisson and Groseillers caught
+up with seven more canoes of Indians from the Upper Country.  The union
+of the two bands was just in time, for the next day they were set upon
+at a _portage_ by the Iroquois.  Ordering the Indians to encase
+themselves in bucklers of matting and buffalo hide, Radisson led the
+assault on the Iroquois barricade.  Trees were cut down, and the Upper
+Indians rushed the rude fort with timbers extemporized into
+battering-rams.  In close range of the enemy, Radisson made a curious
+discovery.  Frenchmen were directing the Iroquois warriors.  Who had
+sent these French to intercept the explorers?  If Radisson suspected
+treachery on the part of jealous rivals from Quebec, it must have
+redoubled his fury; for the Indians from the Upper Country threw
+themselves in the breached barricade with such force that the Iroquois
+lost heart and tossed belts of wampum over the stockades to supplicate
+peace.  It was almost night.  Radisson's Indians drew off to consider
+the terms of peace.  When morning came, behold an empty fort!  The
+French renegades had fled with their Indian allies.
+
+[Illustration: Chateau St. Louis, Quebec, 1669, from one of the oldest
+prints in existence.]
+
+Glad to be rid of the first hindrance, the explorers once more sped
+north.  In the afternoon, Radisson's scouts ran full tilt into a band
+of Iroquois laden with beaver pelts.  The Iroquois were smarting from
+their defeat of the previous night; and what was Radisson's amusement
+to see his own scouts and the Iroquois running from each other in equal
+fright, while the ground between lay strewn with booty!  Radisson
+rushed his Indians for the waterside to intercept the Iroquois' flight.
+The Iroquois left their boats and swam for the opposite shore, where
+they threw up the usual barricade and entrenched themselves to shoot on
+Radisson's passing canoes.  Using the captured beaver pelts as shields,
+the Upper Indians ran the gantlet of the Iroquois fire with the loss of
+only one man.
+
+The slightest defeat may turn well-ordered retreat into panic.  If the
+explorers went on, the Iroquois would hang to the rear of the
+travelling Indians and pick off warriors till the Upper Country people
+became so weakened they would fall an easy prey.  Not flight, but
+fight, was Radisson's motto.  He ordered his men ashore to break up the
+barricade.  Darkness fell over the forest.  The Iroquois could not see
+to fire.  "They spared not their powder," relates Radisson, "but they
+made more noise than hurt."  Attaching a fuse to a barrel of powder,
+Radisson threw this over into the Iroquois fort.  The crash of the
+explosion was followed by a blaze of the Iroquois musketry that killed
+three of Radisson's men.  Radisson then tore the bark off a birch tree,
+filled the bole with powder, and in the darkness crept close to the
+Iroquois barricade and set fire to the logs.  Red tongues of fire
+leaped up, there was a roar as of wind, and the Iroquois fort was on
+fire.  Radisson's men dashed through the fire, hatchet in hand.  The
+Iroquois answered with their death chant.  Friend and foe merged in the
+smoke and darkness.  "We could not know one another in that skirmish of
+blows," says Radisson.  "There was noise to terrify the stoutest man."
+In the midst of the melee a frightful storm of thunder and sheeted rain
+rolled over the forest.  "To my mind," writes the disgusted Radisson,
+"that was something extraordinary.  I think the Devil himself sent that
+storm to let those wretches escape, so that they might destroy more
+innocents."  The rain put out the fire.  As soon as the storm had
+passed, Radisson kindled torches to search for the missing.  Three of
+his men were slain, seven wounded.  Of the enemy, eleven lay dead, five
+were prisoners.  The rest of the Iroquois had fled to the forest.  The
+Upper Indians burned their prisoners according to their custom, and the
+night was passed in mad orgies to celebrate the victory.  "The sleep we
+took did not make our heads giddy," writes Radisson.
+
+The next day they encountered more Iroquois.  Both sides at once began
+building forts; but when he could, Radisson always avoided war.  Having
+gained victory enough to hold the Iroquois in check, he wanted no
+massacre.  That night he embarked his men noiselessly; and never once
+stopping to kindle camp-fire, they paddled from Friday night to Tuesday
+morning.  The _portages _over rocks in the dark cut the _voyageurs'_
+moccasins to shreds.  Every landing was marked with the blood of
+bruised feet.  Sometimes they avoided leaving any trace of themselves
+by walking in the stream, dragging their boats along the edge of the
+rapids.  By Tuesday the Indians were so fagged that they could go no
+farther without rest.  Canoes were moored in the hiding of the rushes
+till the _voyageurs_ slept.  They had been twenty-two days going from
+Three Rivers to Lake Nipissing, and had not slept one hour on land.
+
+It was October when they came to Lake Superior.  The forests were
+painted in all the glory of autumn, and game abounded.  White fish
+appeared under the clear, still waters of the lake like shoals of
+floating metal; bears were seen hulking away from the watering places
+of sandy shores; and wild geese whistled overhead.  After the terrible
+dangers of the voyage, with scant sleep and scanter fare, the country
+seemed, as Radisson says, a terrestrial paradise.  The Indians gave
+solemn thanks to their gods of earth and forest, "and we," writes
+Radisson, "to the God of gods."  Indian summer lay on the land.
+November found the explorers coasting the south shore of Lake Superior.
+They passed the Island of Michilimackinac with its stone arches.
+Radisson heard from the Indians of the copper mines.  He saw the
+pictured rocks that were to become famous for beauty.  "I gave it the
+name of St. Peter because that was my name and I was the first
+Christian to see it," he writes of the stone arch.  "There were in
+these places very deep caves, caused by the violence of the waves."
+Jesuits had been on the part of Lake Superior near the Sault, and poor
+Menard perished in the forests of Lake Michigan; but Radisson and
+Groseillers were the first white men to cruise from south to west and
+west to north, where a chain of lakes and waterways leads from the
+Minnesota lake country to the prairies now known as Manitoba.  Before
+the end of November the explorers rounded the western end of Lake
+Superior and proceeded northwest.  Radisson records that they came to
+great winter encampments of the Crees; and the Crees did not venture
+east for fear of Sautaux and Iroquois.  He mentions a river of
+Sturgeons, where was a great store of fish.
+
+The Crees wished to conduct the two white men to the wooded lake
+region, northwest towards the land of the Assiniboines, where Indian
+families took refuge on islands from those tigers of the plains--the
+Sioux--who were invincible on horseback but less skilful in canoes.
+The rivers were beginning to freeze.  Boats were abandoned; but there
+was no snow for snow-shoe travelling, and the explorers were unable to
+transport the goods brought for trade.  Bidding the Crees go to their
+families and bring back slaves to carry the baggage, Radisson and
+Groseillers built themselves the first fort and the first fur post
+between the Missouri and the North Pole.  It was evidently somewhere
+west of Duluth in either what is now Minnesota or northwestern Ontario.
+
+
+This fur post was the first habitation of civilization in all the Great
+Northwest.  Not the railway, not the cattle trail, not the path of
+forward-marching empire purposely hewing a way through the wilderness,
+opened the West.  It was the fur trade that found the West.  It was the
+fur trade that explored the West.  It was the fur trade that wrested
+the West from savagery.  The beginning was in the little fort built by
+Radisson and Groseillers.  No great factor in human progress ever had a
+more insignificant beginning.
+
+The fort was rushed up by two men almost starving for food.  It was on
+the side of a river, built in the shape of a triangle, with the base at
+the water side.  The walls were of unbarked logs, the roof of thatched
+branches interlaced, with the door at the river side.  In the middle of
+the earth floor, so that the smoke would curl up where the branches
+formed a funnel or chimney, was the fire.  On the right of the fire,
+two hewn logs overlaid with pine boughs made a bed.  On the left,
+another hewn log acted as a table.  Jumbled everywhere, hanging from
+branches and knobs of branches, were the firearms, clothing, and
+merchandise of the two fur traders.  Naturally, a fort two thousand
+miles from help needed sentries.  Radisson had not forgotten his
+boyhood days of Onondaga.  He strung carefully concealed cords through
+the grass and branches around the fort.  To these bells were fastened,
+and the bells were the sentries.  The two white men could now sleep
+soundly without fear of approach.  This fort, from which sprang the
+buoyant, aggressive, prosperous, free life of the Great Northwest, was
+founded and built and completed in two days.
+
+The West had begun.[4]
+
+It was a beginning which every Western pioneer was to repeat for the
+next two hundred years: first, the log cabins; then, the fight with the
+wilderness for food.
+
+Radisson, being the younger, went into the woods to hunt, while
+Groseillers kept house.  Wild geese and ducks were whistling south, but
+"the whistling that I made," writes Radisson, "was another music than
+theirs; for I killed three and scared the rest."  Strange Indians came
+through the forest, but were not admitted to the tiny fort, lest
+knowledge of the traders' weakness should tempt theft.  Many a night
+the explorers were roused by a sudden ringing of the bells or crashing
+through the underbrush, to find that wild animals had been attracted by
+the smell of meat, and wolverine or wildcat was attempting to tear
+through the matted branches of the thatched roof.  The desire for
+firearms has tempted Indians to murder many a trader; so Radisson and
+Groseillers _cached_ all the supplies that they did not need in a hole
+across the river.  News of the two white men alone in the northern
+forest spread like wild-fire to the different Sautaux and Ojibway
+encampments; and Radisson invented another protection in addition to
+the bells.  He rolled gunpowder in twisted tubes of birch bark, and ran
+a circle of this round the fort.  Putting a torch to the birch, he
+surprised the Indians by displaying to them a circle of fire running
+along the ground in a series of jumps.  To the Indians it was magic.
+The two white men were engirt with a mystery that defended them from
+all harm.  Thus white men passed their first winter in the Great
+Northwest.
+
+Toward winter four hundred Crees came to escort the explorers to the
+wooded lake region yet farther west towards the land of the
+Assiniboines, the modern Manitoba.  "We were Caesars," writes Radisson.
+"There was no one to contradict us.  We went away free from any burden,
+while those poor miserables thought themselves happy to carry our
+equipage in the hope of getting a brass ring, or an awl, or a
+needle. . . .  They admired our actions more than the fools of Paris
+their king. . . .[5]  They made a great noise, calling us gods and
+devils.  We marched four days through the woods.  The country was
+beautiful with clear parks.  At last we came within a league of the
+Cree cabins, where we spent the night that we might enter the
+encampment with pomp the next day.  The swiftest Indians ran ahead to
+warn the people of our coming."  Embarking in boats, where the water
+was open, the two explorers came to the Cree lodges.  They were
+welcomed with shouts.  Messengers marched in front, scattering presents
+from the white men,--kettles to call all to a feast of friendship;
+knives to encourage the warriors to be brave; swords to signify that
+the white men would fight all enemies of the Cree; and abundance of
+trinkets--needles and awls and combs and tin mirrors--for the women.
+The Indians prostrated themselves as slaves; and the explorers were
+conducted to a grand council of welcome.  A feast was held, followed by
+a symbolic dance in celebration of the white men's presence.
+
+Their entry to the Great Northwest had been a triumph: but they could
+not escape the privations of the explorer's life.  Winter set in with a
+severity to make up for the long, late autumn.  Snow fell continuously
+till day and night were as one, the sombre forests muffled to silence
+with the wild creatures driven for shelter to secret haunts.  Four
+hundred men had brought the explorers north.  Allowing an average of
+four to each family, there must have been sixteen hundred people in the
+encampment of Crees.  To prevent famine, the Crees scattered to the
+winter hunting-grounds, arranging to come together again in two months
+at a northern rendezvous.  When Radisson and Groseillers came to the
+rendezvous, they learned that the gathering hunters had had poor luck.
+Food was short.  To make matters worse, heavy rains were followed by
+sharp frost.  The snow became iced over, destroying rabbit and grouse,
+which feed the large game.  Radisson noticed that the Indians often
+snatched food from the hands of hungry children.  More starving Crees
+continued to come into camp.  Soon the husbands were taking the wives'
+share of food, and the women were subsisting on dried pelts.  The Crees
+became too weak to carry their snow-shoes, or to gather wood for fire.
+The cries of the dying broke the deathly stillness of the winter
+forest; and the strong began to dog the footsteps of the weak.  "Good
+God, have mercy on these innocent people," writes Radisson; "have mercy
+on us who acknowledge Thee!"  Digging through the snow with their
+rackets, some of the Crees got roots to eat.  Others tore the bark from
+trees and made a kind of soup that kept them alive.  Two weeks after
+the famine set in, the Indians were boiling the pulverized bones of the
+waste heap.  After that the only food was the buckskin that had been
+tanned for clothing.  "We ate it so eagerly," writes Radisson, "that
+our gums did bleed. . . .  We became the image of death."  Before the
+spring five hundred Crees had died of famine.  Radisson and Groseillers
+scarcely had strength to drag the dead from the tepees.  The Indians
+thought that Groseillers had been fed by some fiend, for his heavy,
+black beard covered his thin face.  Radisson they loved, because his
+beardless face looked as gaunt as theirs.[6]
+
+Relief came with the breaking of the weather.  The rain washed the iced
+snows away; deer began to roam; and with the opening of the rivers came
+two messengers from the Sioux to invite Radisson and Groseillers to
+visit their nation.  The two Sioux had a dog, which they refused to
+sell for all Radisson's gifts.  The Crees dared not offend the Sioux
+ambassadors by stealing the worthless cur on which such hungry eyes
+were cast, but at night Radisson slipped up to the Sioux tepee.  The
+dog came prowling out.  Radisson stabbed it so suddenly that it dropped
+without a sound.  Hurrying back, he boiled and fed the meat to the
+famishing Crees.  When the Sioux returned to their own country, they
+sent a score of slaves with food for the starving encampment.  No doubt
+Radisson had plied the first messengers with gifts; for the slaves
+brought word that thirty picked runners from the Sioux were coming to
+escort the white men to the prairie.  To receive their benefactors, and
+also, perhaps, to show that they were not defenceless, the Crees at
+once constructed a fort; for Cree and Sioux had been enemies from time
+immemorial.  In two days came the runners, clad only in short garments,
+and carrying bow and quiver.  The Crees led the young braves to the
+fort.  Kettles were set out.  Fagged from the long run, the Sioux ate
+without a word.  At the end of the meal one rose.  Shooting an arrow
+into the air as a sign that he called Deity to witness the truth of his
+words, he proclaimed in a loud voice that the elders of the Sioux
+nation would arrive next day at the fort to make a treaty with the
+French.
+
+The news was no proof of generosity.  The Sioux were the great warriors
+of the West.  They knew very well that whoever formed an alliance with
+the French would obtain firearms; and firearms meant victory against
+all other tribes.  The news set the Crees by the ears.  Warriors
+hastened from the forests to defend the fort.  The next day came the
+elders of the Sioux in pomp.  They were preceded by the young braves
+bearing bows and arrows and buffalo-skin shields on which were drawn
+figures portraying victories.  Their hair was turned up in a stiff
+crest surmounted by eagle feathers, and their bodies were painted
+bright vermilion.  Behind came the elders, with medicine-bags of
+rattlesnake skin streaming from their shoulders and long strings of
+bears' claws hanging from neck and wrist.  They were dressed in
+buckskin, garnished with porcupine quills, and wore moccasins of
+buffalo hide, with the hair dangling from the heel.  In the belt of
+each was a skull-cracker--a sort of sling stone with a long handle--and
+a war-hatchet.  Each elder carried a peace pipe set with precious
+stones, and stuck in the stem were the quills of the war eagle to
+represent enemies slain.  Women slaves followed, loaded with skins for
+the elders' tents.
+
+[Illustration: A parley on the Plains.]
+
+A great fire had been kindled inside the court of the Cree stockades.
+Round the pavilion the Sioux elders seated themselves.  First, they
+solemnly smoked the calumet of peace.  Then the chief of the Sioux rose
+and chanted a song, giving thanks for their safe journey.  Setting
+aside gifts of rare beaver pelts, he declared that the Sioux had come
+to make friends with the French, who were masters of peace and war;
+that the elders would conduct the white men back to the Sioux country;
+that the mountains were levelled and the valleys cast up, and the way
+made smooth, and branches strewn on the ground for the white men's
+feet, and streams bridged, and the doors of the tepees open.  Let the
+French come to the Sioux!  The Indians would die for the French.  A
+gift was presented to invoke the friendship of the Crees.  Another rich
+gift of furs let out the secret of the Sioux' anxiety: it was that the
+French might give the Sioux "thunder weapons," meaning guns.
+
+The speech being finished, the Crees set a feast before their guests.
+To this feast Radisson and Groseillers came in a style that eclipsed
+the Sioux.  Cree warriors marched in front, carrying guns.  Radisson
+and Groseillers were dressed in armor.[7]  At their belts they wore
+pistol, sword, and dagger.  On their heads were crowns of colored
+porcupine quills.  Two pages carried the dishes and spoons to be used
+at the feast; and four Cree magicians followed with smoking calumets in
+their hands.  Four Indian maids carried bearskins to place on the
+ground when the two explorers deigned to sit down.  Inside the fort
+more than six hundred councillors had assembled.  Outside were gathered
+a thousand spectators.  As Radisson and Groseillers entered, an old
+Cree flung a peace pipe at the explorers' feet and sang a song of
+thanksgiving to the sun that he had lived to see "those terrible men
+whose words (guns) made the earth quake."  Stripping himself of his
+costly furs, he placed them on the white men's shoulders, shouting: "Ye
+are masters over us; dead or alive, dispose of us as you will."
+
+Then Radisson rose and chanted a song, in which he declared that the
+French took the Crees for brethren and would defend them.  To prove his
+words, he threw powder in the fire and had twelve guns shot off, which
+frightened the Sioux almost out of their senses.  A slave girl placed a
+coal in the calumet.  Radisson then presented gifts; the first to
+testify that the French adopted the Sioux for friends; the second as a
+token that the French also took the Crees for friends; the third as a
+sign that the French "would reduce to powder with heavenly fire" any
+one who disturbed the peace between these tribes.  The fourth gift was
+in grateful recognition of the Sioux' courtesy in granting free passage
+through their country.  The gifts consisted of kettles and hatchets and
+awls and needles and looking-glasses and bells and combs and paint, but
+_not_ guns.  Radisson's speech was received with "Ho, ho's" of
+applause.  Sports began.  Radisson offered prizes for racing, jumping,
+shooting with the bow, and climbing a greased post.  All the while,
+musicians were singing and beating the tom-tom, a drum made of buffalo
+hide stretched on hoops and filled with water.
+
+Fourteen days later Radisson and Groseillers set out for the Sioux
+country, or what are now known as the Northwestern states.[8]  On the
+third voyage Radisson came to the Sioux from the south.  On this
+voyage, he came to them from the northeast.  He found that the tribe
+numbered seven thousand men of fighting age.  He remarked that the
+Sioux used a kind of coke or peat for fire instead of wood.  While he
+heard of the tribes that used coal for fire, he does not relate that he
+went to them on this trip.  Again he heard of the mountains far inland,
+where the Indians found copper and lead and a kind of stone that was
+transparent.[9]  He remained six weeks with the Sioux, hunting buffalo
+and deer.  Between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan ran a well-beaten
+trail northeastward, which was used by the Crees and the Sioux in their
+wars.  It is probable that the Sioux escorted Radisson back to the
+Crees by this trail, till he was across what is now the boundary
+between Minnesota and Canada, and could strike directly eastward for
+the Lake of the Woods region, or the hinterland between James Bay and
+Lake Superior.
+
+In spring the Crees went to the Bay of the North, which Radisson was
+seeking; and after leaving the Sioux, the two explorers struck for the
+little fort north of Lake Superior, where they had _cached_ their
+goods.  Spring in the North was later than spring in the South; but the
+shore ice of the Northern lakes had already become soft.  To save time
+they cut across the lakes of Minnesota, dragging their sleighs on the
+ice.  Groseillers' sleigh was loaded with pelts obtained from the
+Sioux, and the elder man began to fag.  Radisson took the heavy sleigh,
+giving Groseillers the lighter one.  About twelve miles out from the
+shore, on one of these lakes, the ice suddenly gave, and Radisson
+plunged through to his waist.  It was as dangerous to turn back as to
+go on.  If they deserted their merchandise, they would have nothing to
+trade with the Indians; but when Radisson succeeded in extricating
+himself, he was so badly strained that he could not go forward another
+step.  There was no sense in risking both their lives on the rotten
+ice.  He urged Groseillers to go on.  Groseillers dared not hesitate.
+Laying two sleds as a wind-break on each side of Radisson, he covered
+the injured man with robes, consigned him to the keeping of God, and
+hurried over the ice to obtain help from the Crees.
+
+The Crees got Radisson ashore, and there he lay in agony for eight
+days.  The Indians were preparing to set out for the North.  They
+invited Radisson to go with them.  His sprain had not healed; but he
+could not miss the opportunity of approaching the Bay of the North.
+For two days he marched with the hunters, enduring torture at every
+step.  The third day he could go no farther and they deserted him.
+Groseillers had gone hunting with another band of Crees.  Radisson had
+neither gun nor hatchet, and the Indians left him only ten pounds of
+pemmican.  After a short rest he journeyed painfully on, following the
+trail of the marching Crees.  On the fifth day he found the frame of a
+deserted wigwam.  Covering it with branches of trees and kindling a
+fire to drive off beasts of prey, he crept in and lay down to sleep.
+He was awakened by a crackling of flame.  The fire had caught the pine
+boughs and the tepee was in a blaze.  Radisson flung his snow-shoes and
+clothing as far as he could, and broke from the fire-trap.
+Half-dressed and lame, shuddering with cold and hunger, he felt through
+the dark over the snow for his clothing.  A far cry rang through the
+forest like the bay of the wolf pack.  Radisson kept solitary watch
+till morning, when he found that the cry came from Indians sent out to
+find him by Groseillers.  He was taken to an encampment, where the
+Crees were building canoes to go to the Bay of the North.
+
+The entire band, with the two explorers, then launched on the rivers
+flowing north.  "We were in danger to perish a thousand times from the
+ice jam," writes Radisson.  ". . .  At last we came full sail from a
+deep bay . . . we came to the seaside, where we found an old house all
+demolished and battered with bullets. . . .  They (the Crees) told us
+about Europeans. . . .  We went from isle to isle all that
+summer. . . .  This region had a great store of cows (caribou). . . .
+We went farther to see the place that the Indians were to pass the
+summer. . . .  The river (where they went) came from the lake that
+empties itself in . . . the Saguenay . . . a hundred leagues from the
+great river of Canada (the St. Lawrence) . . . to where we were in the
+Bay of the North. . . .  We passed the summer quietly coasting the
+seaside. . . .  The people here burn not their prisoners, but knock
+them on the head. . . .  They have a store of turquoise. . . .  They
+find green stones, very fine, at the same Bay of the Sea
+(labradorite). . . .  We went up another river to the Upper Lake
+(Winnipeg)." [10]
+
+For years the dispute has been waged with zeal worthy of a better cause
+whether Radisson referred to Hudson Bay in this passage.  The French
+claim that he did; the English that he did not.  "The house demolished
+with bullets" was probably an old trading post, contend the English;
+but there was no trading post except Radisson's west of Lake Superior
+at that time, retort the French.  By "cows" Radisson meant buffalo, and
+no buffalo were found as far east as Hudson Bay, say the English; by
+"cows" Radisson meant caribou and deer, and herds of these frequented
+the shores of Hudson Bay, answer the French.  No river comes from the
+Saguenay to Hudson Bay, declare the English; yes, but a river comes
+from the direction of the Saguenay, and was followed by subsequent
+explorers, assert the French.[11]  The stones of turquoise and green
+were agates from Lake Superior, explain the English; the stones were
+labradorites from the east coast of the Bay, maintain the French.  So
+the childish quarrel has gone on for two centuries.  England and France
+alike conspired to crush the man while he lived; and when he died they
+quarrelled over the glory of his discoveries.  The point is not whether
+Radisson actually wet his oars in the different indentations of Hudson
+and James bays.  The point is that he found where it lay from the Great
+Lakes, and discovered the watershed sloping north from the Great Lakes
+to Hudson Bay.  This was new ground, and entitled Radisson to the fame
+of a discoverer.
+
+From the Indians of the bay, Radisson heard of another lake leagues to
+the north, whose upper end was always frozen.  This was probably some
+vague story of the lakes in the region that was to become known two
+centuries later as Mackenzie River.  The spring of 1663 found the
+explorers back in the Lake of the Woods region accompanied by seven
+hundred Indians of the Upper Country.  The company filled three hundred
+and sixty canoes.  Indian girls dived into the lake to push the canoes
+off, and stood chanting a song of good-speed till the boats had glided
+out of sight through the long, narrow, rocky gaps of the Lake of the
+Woods.  At Lake Superior the company paused to lay up a supply of
+smoked sturgeon.  At the Sault four hundred Crees turned back.  The
+rest of the Indians hoisted blankets on fishing-poles, and, with a west
+wind, scudded across Lake Huron to Lake Nipissing.  From Lake Nipissing
+they rode safely down the Ottawa to Montreal.  Cannon were fired to
+welcome the discoverers, for New France was again on the verge of
+bankruptcy from a beaver famine.
+
+A different welcome awaited them at Quebec.  D'Argenson, the governor,
+was about to leave for France, and nothing had come of the Jesuit
+expedition up the Saguenay.  He had already sent Couture, for a second
+time, overland to find a way to Hudson Bay; but no word had come from
+Couture, and the governor's time was up.  The explorers had disobeyed
+him in leaving without his permission.  Their return with a fortune of
+pelts was the salvation of the impecunious governor.  From 1627 to 1663
+five distinct fur companies, organized under the patronage of royalty,
+had gone bankrupt in New France.[12]  Therefore, it became a loyal
+governor to protect his Majesty's interests.  Besides, the revenue
+collectors could claim one-fourth of all returns in beaver except from
+posts farmed expressly for the king.  No sooner had Radisson and
+Groseillers come home than D'Argenson ordered Groseillers imprisoned.
+He then fined the explorers $20,000, to build a fort at Three Rivers,
+giving them leave to put their coats-of-arms on the gate; a $30,000
+fine was to go to the public treasury of New France; $70,000 worth of
+beaver was seized as the tax due the revenue.  Of a cargo worth
+$300,000 in modern money, Radisson and Groseillers had less than
+$20,000 left.[13]
+
+Had D'Argenson and his successors encouraged instead of persecuted the
+discoverers, France could have claimed all North America but the narrow
+strip of New England on the east and the Spanish settlements on the
+south.  Having repudiated Radisson and Groseillers, France could not
+claim the fruits of deeds which she punished.[14]
+
+
+[1] The childish dispute whether Bourdon sailed into the bay and up to
+its head, or only to 50 degrees N. latitude, does not concern
+Radisson's life, and, therefore, is ignored.  One thing I can state
+with absolute certainty from having been up the coast of Labrador in a
+most inclement season, that Bourdon could not possibly have gone to and
+back from the inner waters of Hudson Bay between May 2 and August 11.
+J. Edmond Roy and Mr. Sulte both pronounce Bourdon a myth, and his trip
+a fabrication.
+
+[2] "Shame put upon them," says Radisson.  Menard did _not_ go out with
+Radisson and Groseillers, as is erroneously recorded.
+
+[3] I have purposely avoided stating whether Radisson went by way of
+Lake Ontario or the Ottawa.  Dr. Dionne thinks that he went by Ontario
+and Niagara because Radisson refers to vast waterfalls under which a
+man could walk.  Radisson gives the height of these falls as forty
+feet.  Niagara are nearer three hundred; and the Chaudiere of the
+Ottawa would answer Radisson's description better, were it not that he
+says a man could go under the falls for a quarter of a mile.  "The Lake
+of the Castors" plainly points to Lake Nipissing.
+
+[4] The two main reasons why I think that Radisson and Groseillers were
+now moving up that chain of lakes and rivers between Minnesota and
+Canada, connecting Lake of the Woods with Lake Winnipeg, are: (1)
+Oldmixon says it was the report of the Assiniboine Indians from Lake
+Assiniboine (Lake Winnipeg) that led Radisson to seek for the Bay of
+the North overland.  These Assiniboines did not go to the bay by way of
+Lake Superior, but by way of Lake Winnipeg.  (2) A memoire written by
+De la Chesnaye in 1696--see _Documents Nouvelle France_,
+1492-1712--distinctly refers to a _coureur's_ trail from Lake Superior
+to Lake Assiniboine or Lake Winnipeg.  There is no record of any
+Frenchmen but Radisson and Groseillers having followed such a trail to
+the land of the Assiniboines--the Manitoba of to-day--before 1676.
+
+[5] One can guess that a man who wrote in that spirit two centuries
+before the French Revolution would not be a sycophant in
+courts,--which, perhaps, helps to explain the conspiracy of silence
+that obscured Radisson's fame.
+
+[6] My reason for thinking that this region was farther north than
+Minnesota is the size of the Cree winter camp; but I have refrained
+from trying to localize this part of the trip, except to say it was
+west and north of Duluth.  Some writers recognize in the description
+parts of Minnesota, others the hinterland between Lake Superior and
+James Bay.  In the light of the _memoire_ of 1696 sent to the French
+government, I am unable to regard this itinerary as any other than the
+famous fur traders' trail between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg by
+way of Sturgeon River and the Lake of the Woods.
+
+[7] _Radisson Relations_, p. 207.
+
+[8] We are now on safe ground.  There was a well-known trail from what
+is now known as the Rat Portage region to the great Sioux camps west of
+the Mississippi and Red River valleys.  But again I refuse to lay
+myself open to controversy by trying definitely to give either the
+dates or exact places of this trip.
+
+[9] If any proof is wanted that Radisson's journeyings took him far
+west of the Mississippi, these details afford it.
+
+[10] _Radisson's Journal_, pp. 224, 225, 226.
+
+[11] Mr. A. P. Low, who has made the most thorough exploration of
+Labrador and Hudson Bay of any man living, says, "Rupert River forms
+the discharge of the Mistassini lakes . . . and empties into Rupert Bay
+close to the mouth of the Nottoway River, and rises in a number of
+lakes close to the height of land dividing it from the St. Maurice
+River, which joins the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers."
+
+[12] _Les Compagnies de Colonisation sous l'ancien regime_, by
+Chailly-Bert.
+
+[13] Oldmixon says: "Radisson and Groseillers met with some savages on
+the Lake of Assiniboin, and from them they learned that they might go
+by land to the bottom of Hudson's Bay, where the English had not been
+yet, at James Bay; upon which they desired them to conduct them
+thither, and the savages accordingly did it.  They returned to the
+Upper Lake the same way they came, and thence to Quebec, where they
+offered the principal merchants to carry ships to Hudson's Bay; but
+their project was rejected."  Vol. I, p. 548.  Radisson's figures are
+given as "pounds "; but by "_L_" did he mean English "pound" or French
+livre, that is 17 cents?  A franc in 1660 equalled the modern dollar.
+
+[14] The exact tribes mentioned in the _Memoire of 1696_, with whom the
+French were in trade in the West are: On the "Missoury" and south of
+it, the Mascoutins and Sioux; two hundred miles beyond the "Missisipy"
+the Issaguy, the Octbatons, the Omtous, of whom were Sioux capable of
+mustering four thousand warriors, south of Lake Superior, the Sauteurs,
+on "Sipisagny, the river which is the discharge of Lake Asemipigon"
+(Winnipeg), the "Nation of the Grand Rat," Algonquins numbering two
+thousand, who traded with the English of Hudson Bay, De la Chesnaye
+adds in his memoire details of the trip from Lake Superior to the lake
+of the Assiniboines.  Knowing what close co-workers he and Radisson
+were, we can guess where he got his information.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+1664-1676
+
+RADISSON RENOUNCES ALLEGIANCE TO TWO CROWNS
+
+Rival Traders thwart the Plans of the Discoverers--Entangled in
+Lawsuits, the two French Explorers go to England--The Organization of
+the Hudson's Bay Fur Company--Radisson the Storm-centre of
+International Intrigue--Boston Merchants in the Struggle to capture the
+Fur Trade
+
+
+Henceforth Radisson and Groseillers were men without a country.  Twice
+their return from the North with cargoes of beaver had saved New France
+from ruin.  They had discovered more of America than all the other
+explorers combined.  Their reward was jealous rivalry that reduced them
+to beggary; injustice that compelled them to renounce allegiance to two
+crowns; obloquy during a lifetime; and oblivion for two centuries after
+their death.  The very force of unchecked impulse that carries the hero
+over all obstacles may also carry him over the bounds of caution and
+compromise that regulate the conduct of other men.  This was the case
+with Radisson and Groseillers.  They were powerless to resist the
+extortion of the French governor.  The Company of One Hundred
+Associates had given place to the Company of the West Indies.  This
+trading venture had been organized under the direct patronage of the
+king.[1]  It had been proclaimed from the pulpits of France.
+Privileges were promised to all who subscribed for the stock.  The
+Company was granted a blank list of titles to bestow on its patrons and
+servants.  No one else in New France might engage in the beaver trade;
+no one else might buy skins from the Indians and sell the pelts in
+Europe; and one-fourth of the trade went for public revenue.  In spite
+of all the privileges, fur company after fur company failed in New
+France; but to them Radisson had to sell his furs, and when the revenue
+officers went over the cargo, the minions of the governor also seized a
+share under pretence of a fine for trading without a license.
+
+Groseillers was furious, and sailed for France to demand restitution;
+but the intriguing courtiers proved too strong for him.  Though he
+spent 10,000 pounds, nothing was done.  D'Avaugour had come back to
+France, and stockholders of the jealous fur company were all-powerful
+at court.  Groseillers then relinquished all idea of restitution, and
+tried to interest merchants in another expedition to Hudson Bay by way
+of the sea.[2]  He might have spared himself the trouble.  His
+enthusiasm only aroused the quiet smile of supercilious indifference.
+His plans were regarded as chimerical.  Finally a merchant of Rochelle
+half promised to send a boat to Isle Percee at the mouth of the St.
+Lawrence in 1664.  Groseillers had already wasted six months.  Eager
+for action, he hurried back to Three Rivers, where Radisson awaited
+him.  The two secretly took passage in a fishing schooner to Anticosti,
+and from Anticosti went south to Isle Percee.  Here a Jesuit just out
+from France bore the message to them that no ship would come.  The
+promise had been a put-off to rid France of the enthusiast.  New France
+had treated them with injustice.  Old France with mockery.  Which way
+should they turn?  They could not go back to Three Rivers.  This
+attempt to go to Hudson Bay without a license laid them open to a
+second fine.  Baffled, but not beaten, the explorers did what
+ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done in similar
+circumstances--they left the country.  Some rumor of their intention to
+abandon New France must have gone abroad; for when they reached Cape
+Breton, their servants grumbled so loudly that a mob of Frenchmen
+threatened to burn the explorers.  Dismissing their servants, Radisson
+and Groseillers escaped to Port Royal, Nova Scotia.
+
+[Illustration: Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three
+Rivers.]
+
+In Port Royal they met a sea-captain from Boston, Zechariah Gillam, who
+offered his ship for a voyage to Hudson Bay, but the season was far
+spent when they set out.  Captain Gillam was afraid to enter the
+ice-locked bay so late in summer.  The boat turned back, and the trip
+was a loss.  This run of ill-luck had now lasted for a year.  They
+still had some money from the Northern trips, and they signed a
+contract with ship-owners of Boston to take two vessels to Hudson Bay
+the following spring.  Provisions must be laid up for the long voyage.
+One of the ships was sent to the Grand Banks for fish.  Rounding
+eastward past the crescent reefs of Sable Island, the ship was caught
+by the beach-combers and totally wrecked on the drifts of sand.
+Instead of sailing for Hudson Bay in the spring of 1665, Radisson and
+Groseillers were summoned to Boston to defend themselves in a lawsuit
+for the value of the lost vessel.  They were acquitted; but lawsuits on
+the heels of misfortune exhausted the resources of the adventurers.
+The exploits of the two Frenchmen had become the sensation of Boston.
+Sir Robert Carr, one of the British commissioners then in the New
+England colonies, urged Radisson and Groseillers to renounce allegiance
+to a country that had shown only ingratitude, and to come to
+England.[3]  When Sir George Cartwright sailed from Nantucket on August
+1, 1665, he was accompanied by Radisson and Groseillers.[4]  Misfortune
+continued to dog them.  Within a few days' sail of England, their ship
+encountered the Dutch cruiser _Caper_.  For two hours the ships poured
+broadsides of shot into each other's hulls.  The masts were torn from
+the English vessel.  She was boarded and stripped, and the Frenchmen
+were thoroughly questioned.  Then the captives were all landed in
+Spain.  Accompanied by the two Frenchmen, Sir George Cartwright
+hastened to England early in 1666.  The plague had driven the court
+from London to Oxford.  Cartwright laid the plans of the explorers
+before Charles II.  The king ordered 40s. a week paid to Radisson and
+Groseillers for the winter.  They took chambers in London.  Later they
+followed the court to Windsor, where they were received by King Charles.
+
+The English court favored the project of trade in Hudson Bay, but
+during the Dutch war nothing could be done.  The captain of the Dutch
+ship _Caper_ had sent word of the French explorers to De Witt, the
+great statesman.  De Witt despatched a spy from Picardy, France, one
+Eli Godefroy Touret, who chanced to know Groseillers, to meet the
+explorers in London.  Masking as Groseillers' nephew, Touret tried to
+bribe both men to join the Dutch.  Failing this, he attempted to
+undermine their credit with the English by accusing Radisson and
+Groseillers of counterfeiting money; but the English court refused to
+be deceived, and Touret was imprisoned.  Owing to the plague and the
+war, two years passed without the vague promises of the English court
+taking shape.  Montague, the English ambassador to France, heard of the
+explorers' feats, and wrote to Prince Rupert.  Prince Rupert was a
+soldier of fortune, who could enter into the spirit of the explorers.
+He had fought on the losing side against Cromwell, and then taken to
+the high seas to replenish broken fortunes by piracy.  The wealth of
+the beaver trade appealed to him.  He gave all the influence of his
+_prestige_ to the explorers' plans.  By the spring of 1668 money enough
+had been advanced to fit out two boats for Hudson Bay.  In the _Eagle_,
+with Captain Stannard, went Radisson; in the _Nonsuch_, with Captain
+Zechariah Gillam of Boston, went Groseillers.  North of Ireland furious
+gales drove the ships apart.  Radisson's vessel was damaged and driven
+back to London; but his year was not wasted.  It is likely that the
+account of his first voyages was written while Groseillers was away.[5]
+Sometime during his stay in London he married Mary Kirke, a daughter of
+the Huguenot John Kirke, whose family had long ago gone from Boston and
+captured Quebec.
+
+Gillam's journal records that the _Nonsuch_ left Gravesend the 3d of
+June, 1668, reached Resolution Island on August 4, and came to anchor
+at the south of James Bay on September 29.[6]  It was here that
+Radisson had come overland five years before, when he thought that he
+discovered a river flowing from the direction of the St. Lawrence.  The
+river was Nemisco.  Groseillers called it Rupert in honor of his
+patron.  A palisaded fort was at once built, and named King Charles
+after the English monarch.  By December, the bay was locked in the
+deathly silence of northern frost.  Snow fell till the air became
+darkened day after day, a ceaseless fall of muffling snow; the
+earth--as Gillam's journal says--"seemed frozen to death."  Gillam
+attended to the fort, Groseillers to the trade.  Dual command was bound
+to cause a clash.  By April, 1669, the terrible cold had relaxed.  The
+ice swept out of the river with a roar.  Wild fowl came winging north
+in myriad flocks.  By June the fort was sweltering in almost tropical
+heat.  The _Nonsuch_ hoisted anchor and sailed for England, loaded to
+the water-line with a cargo of furs.  Honors awaited Groseillers in
+London.  King Charles created him a _Knight de la Jarretiere_, an order
+for princes of the royal blood.[7]  In addition, he was granted a sum
+of money.  Prince Rupert and Radisson had, meanwhile, been busy
+organizing a fur company.  The success of Groseillers' voyage now
+assured this company a royal charter, which was granted in May, 1670.
+Such was the origin of the Hudson's Bay Company.  Prince Rupert was its
+first governor; Charles Bayly was appointed resident governor on the
+bay.  Among the first shareholders were Prince Rupert, the Duke of
+York, Sir George Cartwright, the Duke of Albermarle, Shaftesbury, Sir
+Peter Colleton, who had advanced Radisson a loan during the long period
+of waiting, and Sir John Kirke, whose daughter had married Radisson.
+
+That spring, Radisson and Groseillers again sailed for the bay.  In
+1671, three ships were sent out from England, and Radisson established
+a second post westward at Moose.  With Governor Bayly, he sailed up and
+met the Indians at what was to become the great fur capital of the
+north, Port Nelson, or York.  The third year of the company's
+existence, Radisson and Groseillers perceived a change.  Not so many
+Indians came down to the English forts to trade.  Those who came brought
+fewer pelts and demanded higher prices.  Rivals had been at work.  The
+English learned that the French had come overland and were paying high
+prices to draw the Indians from the bay.  In the spring a council was
+held.[8]  Should they continue on the east side of the bay, or move
+west, where there would be no rivalry?  Groseillers boldly counselled
+moving inland and driving off French competition.  Bayly was for moving
+west.  He even hinted that Groseillers' advice sprang from disloyalty
+to the English.  The clash that was inevitable from divided command was
+this time avoided by compromise.  They would all sail west, and all
+come back to Rupert's River.  When they returned, they found that the
+English ensign had been torn down and the French flag raised.[9]  A
+veteran Jesuit missionary of the Saguenay, Charles Albanel, two French
+companions, and some Indian guides had ensconced themselves in the
+empty houses.[10]  The priest now presented Governor Bayly with letters
+from Count Frontenac commending the French to the good offices of
+Governor Bayly.[11]
+
+France had not been idle.
+
+When it was too late, the country awakened to the injustice done
+Radisson and Groseillers.  While Radisson was still in Boston, all
+restrictions were taken from the beaver trade, except the tax of
+one-fourth to the revenue.  The Jesuit Dablon, who was near the western
+end of Lake Superior, gathered all the information he could from the
+Indians of the way to the Sea of the North.  Father Marquette learned
+of the Mississippi from the Indians.  The Western tribes had been
+summoned to the Sault, where Sieur de Saint-Lusson met them in treaty
+for the French; and the French flag was raised in the presence of Pere
+Claude Allouez, who blessed the ceremony.  M. Colbert sent instructions
+to M. Talon, the intendant of New France, to grant titles of nobility
+to Groseillers' nephew in order to keep him in the country.[12]  On the
+Saguenay was a Jesuit, Charles Albanel, loyal to the French and of
+English birth, whose devotion to the Indians during the small-pox
+scourge of 1670 had given him unbounded influence.  Talon, the
+intendant of New France, was keen to retrieve in the North what
+D'Argenson's injustice had lost.  Who could be better qualified to go
+overland to Hudson Bay than the old missionary, loyal to France, of
+English birth, and beloved by the Indians?  Albanel was summoned to
+Quebec and gladly accepted the commission.  He chose for companions
+Saint-Simon and young Couture, the son of the famous guide to the
+Jesuits.  The company left Quebec on August 6, 1671, and secured a
+guide at Tadoussac.  Embarking in canoes, they ascended the shadowy
+canon of the Saguenay to Lake St. John.  On the 7th of September they
+left the forest of Lake St. John and mounted the current of a winding
+river, full of cataracts and rapids, toward Mistassini.  On this stream
+they met Indians who told them that two European vessels were on Hudson
+Bay.  The Indians showed Albanel tobacco which they had received from
+the English.
+
+It seemed futile to go on a voyage of discovery where English were
+already in possession.  The priest sent one of the Frenchmen and two
+Indians back to Quebec for passports and instructions.  What the
+instructions were can only be guessed by subsequent developments.  The
+messengers left the depth of the forest on the 19th of September, and
+had returned from Quebec by the 10th of October.  Snow was falling.
+The streams had frozen, and the Indians had gone into camp for the
+winter.  Going from wigwam to wigwam through the drifted forest. Father
+Albanel passed the winter preaching to the savages.  Skins of the chase
+were laid on the wigwams.  Against the pelts, snow was banked to close
+up every chink.  Inside, the air was blue with smoke and the steam of
+the simmering kettle.  Indian hunters lay on the moss floor round the
+central fires.  Children and dogs crouched heterogeneously against the
+sloping tent walls.  Squaws plodded through the forest, setting traps
+and baiting the fish-lines that hung through airholes of the thick ice.
+In these lodges Albanel wintered.  He was among strange Indians and
+suffered incredible hardships.  Where there was room, he, too, sat
+crouched under the crowded tent walls, scoffed at by the braves, teased
+by the unrebuked children, eating when the squaws threw waste food to
+him, going hungry when his French companions failed to bring in game.
+Sometimes night overtook him on the trail.  Shovelling a bed through
+the snow to the moss with his snow-shoes, piling shrubs as a
+wind-break, and kindling a roaring fire, the priest passed the night
+under the stars.
+
+When spring came, the Indians opposed his passage down the river.  A
+council was called.  Albanel explained that his message was to bring
+the Indians down to Quebec and keep them from going to the English for
+trade.  The Indians, who had acted as middlemen between Quebec traders
+and the Northern tribes, saw the advantage of undermining the English
+trade.  Gifts were presented by the Frenchmen, and the friendship of
+the Indians was secured.  On June 1, 1672, sixteen savages embarked
+with the three Frenchmen.  For the next ten days, the difficulties were
+almost insurmountable.  The river tore through a deep gorge of sheer
+precipices which the _voyageurs_ could pass only by clinging to the
+rock walls with hands and feet.  One _portage_ was twelve miles long
+over a muskeg of quaking moss that floated on water.  At every step the
+travellers plunged through to their waists.  Over this the long canoes
+and baggage had to be carried.  On the 10th of June they reached the
+height of land that divides the waters of Hudson Bay from the St.
+Lawrence.  The watershed was a small plateau with two lakes, one of
+which emptied north, the other, south.  As they approached Lake
+Mistassini, the Lake Indians again opposed their free passage down the
+rivers.
+
+"You must wait," they said, "till we notify the elders of your coming."
+Shortly afterwards, the French met a score of canoes with the Indians
+all painted for war.  The idea of turning back never occurred to the
+priest.  By way of demonstrating his joy at meeting the warriors, he
+had ten volleys of musketry fired off, which converted the war into a
+council of peace.  At the assemblage, Albanel distributed gifts to the
+savages.
+
+"Stop trading with the English at the sea," he cried; "they do not pray
+to God; come to Lake St. John with your furs; there you will always
+find a _robe noire_ to instruct you and baptize you."
+
+The treaty was celebrated by a festival and a dance.  In the morning,
+after solemn religious services, the French embarked.  On the 18th of
+June they came to Lake Mistassini, an enormous body of water similar to
+the Great Lakes.[13]  From Mistassini, the course was down-stream and
+easier.  High water enabled them to run many of the rapids; and on the
+28th of June, after a voyage of eight hundred leagues, four hundred
+rapids, and two hundred waterfalls, they came to the deserted houses of
+the English.  The very next day they found the Indians and held
+religious services, making solemn treaty, presenting presents, and
+hoisting the French flag.  For the first three weeks of July they
+coasted along the shores of James Bay, taking possession of the country
+in the name of the French king.  Then they cruised back to King Charles
+Fort on Rupert's River.[14]  They were just in time to meet the
+returned Englishmen.
+
+Governor Bayly of the Hudson's Bay Company was astounded to find the
+French at Rupert's River.  Now he knew what had allured the Indians
+from the bay, but he hardly relished finding foreigners in possession
+of his own fort.  The situation required delicate tact.  Governor Bayly
+was a bluff tradesman with an insular dislike of Frenchmen and
+Catholics common in England at a time when bigoted fanaticism ran riot.
+King Charles was on friendly terms with France.  Therefore, the
+Jesuit's passport must be respected; so Albanel was received with at
+least a show of courtesy.  But Bayly was the governor of a fur company;
+and the rights of the company must be respected.  To make matters
+worse, the French voyageurs brought letters to Groseillers and Radisson
+from their relatives in Quebec.  Bayly, no doubt, wished the Jesuit
+guest far enough.  Albanel left in a few weeks.  Then Bayly's
+suspicions blazed out in open accusations that the two French explorers
+had been playing a double game and acting against English interests.
+In September came the company ship to the fort with Captain Gillam, who
+had never agreed with Radisson from the time that they had quarrelled
+about going from Port Royal to the straits of Hudson Bay.  It has been
+said that, at this stage, Radisson and Groseillers, feeling the
+prejudice too strong against them, deserted and passed overland through
+the forests to Quebec.  The records of the Hudson's Bay Company do not
+corroborate this report.  Bayly in the heat of his wrath sent home
+accusations with the returning ship.  The ship that came out in 1674
+requested Radisson to go to England and report.  This he did, and so
+completely refuted the charges of disloyalty that in 1675 the company
+voted him 100 pounds a year; but Radisson would not sit quietly in
+England on a pension.  Owing to hostility toward him among the English
+employees of the company, he could not go back to the bay.  Meantime he
+had wife and family and servants to maintain on 100 pounds a year.  If
+England had no more need of him, France realized the fact that she had.
+Debts were accumulating.  Restless as a caged tiger, Radisson found
+himself baffled until a message came from the great Colbert of France,
+offering to pay all his debts and give him a position in the French
+navy.  His pardon was signed and proclaimed.  In 1676, France granted
+him fishing privileges on the island of Anticosti; but the lodestar of
+the fur trade still drew him, for that year he was called to Quebec to
+meet a company of traders conferring on the price of beaver.[15]  In
+that meeting assembled, among others, Jolliet, La Salle, Groseillers,
+and Radisson--men whose names were to become immortal.
+
+It was plain that the two adventurers could not long rest.[16]
+
+
+[1] Chailly-Bert.
+
+[2] The Jesuit expeditions of Dablon and Dreuillettes in 1661 had
+failed to reach the bay overland.  Cabot had coasted Labrador in 1497;
+Captain Davis had gone north of Hudson Bay in 1585-1587; Hudson had
+lost his life there in 1610.  Sir Thomas Button had explored Baffin's
+Land, Nelson River, and the Button Islands in 1612; Munck, the Dane,
+had found the mouth of the Churchill River in 1619, James and Fox had
+explored the inland sea in 1631; Shapley had brought a ship up from
+Boston in 1640; and Bourdon, the Frenchman, had gone up to the straits
+in 1656-1657.
+
+[3] George Carr, writing to Lord Arlington on December 14, 1665, says:
+"Hearing some Frenchmen discourse in New England . . . of a great trade
+of beaver, and afterward making proof of what they had said, he thought
+them the best present he could possibly make his Majesty and persuaded
+them to come to England."
+
+[4] Colonel Richard Nicolls, writing on July 31, 1665, says he
+"supposes Col. Geo. Cartwright is now at sea."
+
+[5] It plainly could not have been written while _en route_ across the
+Atlantic with Sir George Cartwright, for it records events after that
+time.
+
+[6] Robson's _Hudson Bay_.
+
+[7] See Dr. N. E. Dionne, also Marie de l'Incarnation, but Sulte
+discredits this granting of a title.
+
+[8] See Robson's _Hudson Bay_, containing reference to the journal kept
+by Gorst, Bayly's secretary, at Rupert Fort.
+
+[9] See State Papers, Canadian Archives, 1676, January 26, Whitehall:
+Memorial of the Hudson Bay Company complaining of Albanel, a Jesuit,
+attempting to seduce Radisson and Groseillers from the company's
+services; in absence of ships pulling down the British ensign and
+tampering with the Indians.
+
+[10] I am inclined to think that Albanel may not have been aware of the
+documents which he carried from Quebec to the traders being practically
+an offer to bribe Radisson and Groseillers to desert England.  Some
+accounts say that Albanel was accompanied by Groseillers' son, but I
+find no authority for this.  On the other hand, Albanel does not
+mention the Englishmen being present.  Just as Radisson and
+Groseillers, ten years before, had taken possession of the old house
+battered with bullets, so Albanel took possession of the deserted huts.
+Here is what his account says (Cramoisy edition of the _Relations_):
+"Le 28 June a peine avions nous avance un quart de lieue, que nous
+rencontrasmes a main gauche dans un petit ruisseau un heu avec ses
+agrez de dix ou dou tonneaux, qui portoit le Pavilion Anglois et la
+voile latine; dela a la portee du fusil, nous entrasmes dans deux
+maisons desertes . . . nous rencontrasmes deux ou trois cabanes et un
+chien abandonne. . . ."  His tampering with the Indians was simply the
+presentation of gifts to attract them to Quebec.
+
+[11] See State Papers, Canadian Archives: M. Frontenac, the commander
+of French (?) king's troops at Hudson Bay, introduces and recommends
+Father Albanel.
+
+[12] State Papers, Canadian Archives.
+
+[13] For some years there were sensational reports that Mistassini was
+larger than Lake Superior.  Mr. Low, of the Canadian Geological Survey,
+in a very exhaustive report, shows this is not so.  Still, the lake
+ranks with the large lakes of America.  Mr. Low gives its dimensions as
+one hundred miles long and twelve miles wide.
+
+[14] There is a discrepancy in dates here which I leave savants to
+worry out.  _Albanel's Relation_ (Cramoisy) is of 1672.  Thomas Gorst,
+secretary to Governor Bayly, says that the quarrel took place in 1674.
+Oldmixon, who wrote from hearsay, says in 1673.  Robson, who had access
+to Hudson's Bay records, says 1676; and I am inclined to think they all
+agree.  In a word, Radisson and Groseillers were on bad terms with the
+local Hudson's Bay Company governor from the first, and the open
+quarrel took place only in 1675.  Considering the bigotry of the times,
+the quarrel was only natural.  Bayly was governor, but he could not
+take precedence over Radisson and Groseillers.  He was Protestant and
+English.  They were Catholics and French.  Besides, they were really at
+the English governor's mercy; for they could not go back to Canada
+until publicly pardoned by the French king.
+
+[15] State Papers, Canadian Archives, October 20, 1676, Quebec: Report
+of proceedings regarding the price of beaver . . . by an ordinance,
+October 19, 1676, M. Jacques Duchesneau, Intendant, had called a
+meeting of the leading fur traders to consult about fixing the price of
+beaver.  There were present, among others, Robert, Cavelier de la
+Salle, . . . Charles le Moyne, . . . two Godefroys of Three
+Rivers, . . . Groseillers, . . . Jolliet, . . . Pierre Radisson.
+
+[16] Mr. Low's geological report on Labrador contains interesting
+particulars of the route followed by Father Albanel.  He speaks of the
+gorge and swamps and difficult _portages_ in precisely the same way as
+the priest, though Albanel must have encountered the worst possible
+difficulties on the route, for he went down so early in the spring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+1682-1684
+
+RADISSON GIVES UP A CAREER IN THE NAVY FOR THE FUR TRADE
+
+Though opposed by the Monopolists of Quebec, he secures Ships for a
+Voyage to Hudson Bay--Here he encounters a Pirate Ship from Boston and
+an English Ship of the Hudson's Bay Company--How he plays his Cards to
+win against Both Rivals
+
+
+A clever man may be a dangerous rival.  Both France and England
+recognized this in Radisson.  The Hudson's Bay Company distrusted him
+because he was a foreigner.  The fur traders of Quebec were jealous.
+The Hudson's Bay Company had offered him a pension of 100 pounds a year
+to do nothing.  France had pardoned his secession to England, paid his
+debts, and given him a position in the navy, and when the fleet was
+wrecked returning from the campaign against Dutch possessions in the
+West Indies, the French king advanced money for Radisson to refit
+himself; but France distrusted the explorer because he had an English
+wife.  All that France and England wanted Radisson to do was to keep
+quiet.  What the haughty spirit of Radisson would _not_ do for all the
+fortunes which two nations could offer to bribe him--was to keep quiet.
+He cared more for the game than the winnings; and the game of sitting
+still and drawing a pension for doing nothing was altogether too tame
+for Radisson.  Groseillers gave up the struggle and retired for the
+time to his family at Three Rivers.  At Quebec, in 1676, Radisson heard
+of others everywhere reaping where he had sown.  Jolliet and La Salle
+were preparing to push the fur trade of New France westward of the
+Great Lakes, where Radisson had penetrated twenty years previously.
+Fur traders of Quebec, who organized under the name of the Company of
+the North, yearly sent their canoes up the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and
+Saguenay to the forests south of Hudson Bay, which Radisson had
+traversed.  On the bay itself the English company were entrenched.
+North, northwest, and west, Radisson had been the explorer; but the
+reward of his labor had been snatched by other hands.
+
+[Illustration: "Skin for Skin," Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay
+Company.]
+
+Radisson must have served meritoriously on the fleet, for after the
+wreck he was offered the command of a man-of-war; but he asked for a
+commission to New France.  From this request there arose complications.
+His wife's family, the Kirkes, had held claims against New France from
+the days when the Kirkes of Boston had captured Quebec.  These claims
+now amounted to 40,000 pounds.  M. Colbert, the great French statesman,
+hesitated to give a commission to a man allied by marriage with the
+enemies of New France.  Radisson at last learned why preferment had
+been denied him.  It was on account of his wife.  Twice Radisson
+journeyed to London for Mary Kirke.  Those were times of an easy change
+in faith.  Charles II was playing double with Catholics and
+Protestants.  The Kirkes were closely attached to the court; and it
+was, perhaps, not difficult for the Huguenot wife to abjure
+Protestantism and declare herself a convert to the religion of her
+husband.  But when Radisson proposed taking her back to France, that
+was another matter.  Sir John Kirke forbade his daughter's departure
+till the claims of the Kirke family against New France had been paid.
+When Radisson returned without his wife, he was reproached by M.
+Colbert for disloyalty.  The government refused its patronage to his
+plans for the fur trade; but M. Colbert sent him to confer with La
+Chesnaye, a prominent fur trader and member of the Council in New
+France, who happened to be in Paris at that time.  La Chesnaye had been
+sent out to Canada to look after the affairs of a Rouen fur-trading
+company.  Soon he became a commissioner of the West Indies Company; and
+when the merchants of Quebec organized the Company of the North, La
+Chesnaye became a director.  No one knew better than he how bitterly
+the monopolists of Quebec would oppose Radisson's plans for a trip to
+Hudson Bay; but the prospects were alluring.  La Chesnaye was deeply
+involved in the fur trade and snatched at the chance of profits to
+stave off the bankruptcy that reduced him to beggary a few years later.
+In defiance of the rival companies and independent of those with which
+he was connected, he offered to furnish ships and share profits with
+Radisson and Groseillers for a voyage to Hudson Bay.
+
+M. Colbert did not give his patronage to the scheme; but he wished
+Radisson a God-speed.  The Jesuits advanced Radisson money to pay his
+passage; and in the fall of 1681, he arrived in Quebec.  La Chesnaye
+met him, and Groseillers was summoned.  The three then went to the
+Chateau Saint-Louis to lay their plans before the governor.  Though the
+privileges of the West Indies Company had been curtailed, the fur trade
+was again regulated by license.[1]  Frontenac had granted a license to
+the Company of the North for the fur trade of Hudson Bay.  He could not
+openly favor Radisson; but he winked at the expedition by granting
+passports to the explorers, and the three men who were to accompany
+him, Jean Baptiste, son of Groseillers, Pierre Allemand, the pilot who
+was afterward given a commission to explore the Eskimo country, and
+Jean Godefroy, an interpreter.[2]  Jean Baptiste, Radisson's nephew,
+invested 500 pounds in goods for barter.  Others of Three Rivers and
+Quebec advanced money, to provision the ship.[3]  Ten days after
+Radisson's arrival in Quebec, the explorers had left the high fortress
+of the St. Lawrence to winter in Acadia.  When spring came, they went
+with the fishing fleets to Isle Percee, where La Chesnaye was to send
+the ships.  Radisson's ship, the _St. Pierre_,--named after
+himself,--came first, a rickety sloop of fifty tons with a crew of
+twelve mutinous, ill-fed men, a cargo of goods for barter, and scant
+enough supply of provisions.  Groseillers' ship, the _St. Anne_, was
+smaller and better built, with a crew of fifteen.  The explorers set
+sail on the 11th of July.  From the first there was trouble with the
+crews.  Fresh-water _voyageurs_ make bad ocean sailors.  Food was
+short.  The voyage was to be long.  It was to unknown waters, famous
+for disaster.  The sea was boisterous.  In the months of June and July,
+the North Atlantic is beset with fog and iceberg.  The ice sweeps south
+in mountainous bergs that have thawed and split before they reach the
+temperate zones.[4]  On the 30th of July the two ships passed the
+Straits of Belle Isle.  Fog-banks hung heavy on the blue of the far
+watery horizon.  Out of the fog, like ghosts in gloom, drifted the
+shadowy ice-floes.  The coast of Labrador consists of bare, domed,
+lonely hills alternated with rock walls rising sheer from the sea as
+some giant masonry.  Here the rock is buttressed by a sharp angle
+knife-edged in a precipice.  There, the beetling walls are guarded by
+long reefs like the teeth of a saw.  Over these reefs, the drifting
+tide breaks with multitudinous voices.  The French _voyageurs_ had
+never known such seafaring.  In the wail of the white-foamed reefs,
+their superstition heard the shriek of the demons.  The explorers had
+anchored in one of the sheltered harbors, which the sailors call
+"holes-in-the-wall."  The crews mutinied.  They would go no farther
+through ice-drift and fog to an unknown sea.  Radisson never waited for
+the contagion of fear to work.  He ordered anchors up and headed for
+open sea.  Then he tried to encourage the sailors with promises.  They
+would not hear him; for the ship's galley was nearly empty of food.
+Then Radisson threatened the first mutineer to show rebellion with such
+severe punishment as the hard customs of the age permitted.  The crew
+sulked, biding its time.  At that moment the lookout shouted "Sail ho!"
+
+All hands discerned a ship with a strange sail, such as Dutch and
+Spanish pirates carried, bearing down upon them shoreward.  The lesser
+fear was forgotten in the greater.  The _St. Pierre's_ crew crowded
+sail.  Heading about, the two explorers' ships threaded the rock reefs
+like pursued deer.  The pirate came on full speed before the wind.
+Night fell while Radisson was still hiding among the rocks.
+Notwithstanding reefs and high seas, while the pirate ship hove to for
+the night, Radisson stole out in the dark and gave his pursuer the
+slip.  The chase had saved him a mutiny.
+
+As the vessels drove northward, the ice drifted past like a white world
+afloat.  When Radisson approached the entrance to Hudson Bay, he met
+floes in impenetrable masses.  So far the ships had avoided delay by
+tacking along the edges of the ice-fields, from lake to lake of ocean
+surrounded by ice.  Now the ice began to crush together, driven by wind
+and tide with furious enough force to snap the two ships like
+egg-shells.  Radisson watched for a free passage, and, with a wind to
+rear, scudded for shelter of a hole-in-the-wall.  Here he met the
+Eskimo, and provisions were replenished; but the dangers of the
+ice-fields had frightened the crews again.  In two days Radisson put to
+sea to avoid a second mutiny.  The wind was landward, driving the ice
+back from the straits, and they passed safely into Hudson Bay.  The ice
+again surrounded them; but it was useless for the men to mutiny.  Ice
+blocked up all retreat.  Jammed among the floes, Groseillers was afraid
+to carry sail, and fell behind.  Radisson drove ahead, now skirting the
+ice-floes, now pounded by breaking icebergs, now crashing into surface
+brash or puddled ice to the fore.  "We were like to have perished," he
+writes, "but God was pleased to preserve us."
+
+On the 26th of August, six weeks after sailing from Isle Percee,
+Radisson rode triumphantly in on the tide to Hayes River, south of
+Nelson River, where he had been with the English ships ten years
+before.  Two weeks later the _Ste. Anne_, with Groseillers, arrived.
+The two ships cautiously ascended the river, seeking a harbor.  Fifteen
+miles from salt water, Radisson anchored.  At last he was back in his
+native element, the wilderness, where man must set himself to conquer
+and take dominion over earth.
+
+Groseillers was always the trader, Radisson the explorer.  Leaving his
+brother-in-law to build the fort, Radisson launched a canoe on Hayes
+River to explore inland.  Young Jean Groseillers accompanied him to
+look after the trade with the Indians.[5]  For eight days they paddled
+up a river that was destined to be the path of countless traders and
+pioneers for two centuries, and that may yet be destined to become the
+path of a northern commerce.  By September the floodtide of Hayes River
+had subsided.  In a week the _voyageurs_ had travelled probably three
+hundred miles, and were within the region of Lake Winnipeg, where the
+Cree hunters assemble in October for the winter.  Radisson had come to
+this region by way of Lake Superior with the Cree hunters twenty years
+before, and his visit had become a tradition among the tribes.  Beaver
+are busy in October gnawing down young saplings for winter food.
+Radisson observed chips floating past the canoe.  Where there are
+beaver, there should be Indians; so the _voyageurs_ paddled on.  One
+night, as they lay round the camp-fire, with canoes overturned, a deer,
+startled from its evening drinking-place, bounded from the thicket.  A
+sharp whistle--and an Indian ran from the brush of an island opposite
+the camp, signalling the white men to head the deer back; but when
+Radisson called from the waterside, the savage took fright and dashed
+for the woods.
+
+All that night the _voyageurs_ kept sleepless guard.  In the morning
+they moved to the island and kindled a signal-fire to call the Indians.
+In a little while canoes cautiously skirted the island, and the chief
+of the band stood up, bow and arrow in hand.  Pointing his arrows to
+the deities of north, south, east, and west, he broke the shaft to
+splinters, as a signal of peace, and chanted his welcome:--
+
+  "Ho, young men, be not afraid!
+  The sun is favorable to us!
+  Our enemies shall fear us!
+  This is the man we have wished
+  Since the days of our fathers!"
+
+
+With a leap, the chief sprang into the water and swam ashore, followed
+by all the canoes.  Radisson called out to know who was commander.  The
+chief, with a sign as old and universal as humanity, bowed his head in
+servility.  Radisson took the Indian by the hand, and, seating him by
+the fire, chanted an answer in Cree:--
+
+  "I know all the earth!
+  Your friends shall be my friends!
+  I come to bring you arms to destroy your enemies!
+  Nor wife nor child shall die of hunger!
+  For I have brought you merchandise!
+  Be of good cheer!
+  I will be thy son!
+  I have brought thee a father!
+  He is yonder below building a fort
+  Where I have two great ships!" [6]
+
+
+The chief kept pace with the profuse compliments by vowing the life of
+his tribe in service of the white man.  Radisson presented pipes and
+tobacco to the Indians.  For the chief he reserved a fowling-piece with
+powder and shot.  White man and Indian then exchanged blankets.
+Presents were sent for the absent wives.  The savages were so grateful
+that they cast all their furs at Radisson's feet, and promised to bring
+their hunt to the fort in spring.  In Paris and London Radisson had
+been harassed by jealousy.  In the wilderness he was master of
+circumstance; but a surprise awaited him at Groseillers' fort.
+
+The French habitation--called Fort Bourbon--had been built on the north
+shore of Hayes or Ste. Therese River.  Directly north, overland, was
+another broad river with a gulflike entrance.  This was the Nelson.
+Between the two rivers ran a narrow neck of swampy, bush-grown land.
+The day that Radisson returned to the newly erected fort, there rolled
+across the marshes the ominous echo of cannon-firing.  Who could the
+newcomers be?  A week's sail south at the head of the bay were the
+English establishments of the Hudson's Bay Company.  The season was far
+advanced.  Had English ships come to winter on Nelson River?  Ordering
+Jean Groseillers to go back inland to the Indians, Radisson launched
+down Hayes River in search of the strange ship.  He went to the salt
+water, but saw nothing.  Upon returning, he found that Jean Groseillers
+had come back to the fort with news of more cannonading farther inland.
+Radisson rightly guessed that the ship had sailed up Nelson River,
+firing cannon as she went to notify Indians for trade.  Picking out
+three intrepid men, Radisson crossed the marsh by a creek which the
+Indian canoes used, to go to Nelson River.[7]  Through the brush the
+scout spied a white tent on an island.  All night the Frenchmen lay in
+the woods, watching their rivals and hoping that some workman might
+pass close enough to be seized and questioned.  At noon, next day,
+Radisson's patience was exhausted.  He paddled round the island, and
+showed himself a cannon-shot distant from the fort.  Holding up a pole,
+Radisson waved as if he were an Indian afraid to approach closer in
+order to trade.  The others hallooed a welcome and gabbled out Indian
+words from a guide-book.  Radisson paddled a length closer.  The others
+ran eagerly down to the water side away from their cannon.  In signal
+of friendship, they advanced unarmed.  Radisson must have laughed to
+see how well his ruse worked.
+
+"Who are you?" he demanded in plain English, "and what do you want?"
+The traders called back that they were Englishmen come for beaver.
+Again the crafty Frenchman must have laughed; for he knew very well
+that all English ships except those of the Hudson's Bay Company were
+prohibited by law from coming here to trade.[8]  Though the strange
+ship displayed an English ensign, the flag did not show the magical
+letters "H. B. C."
+
+"Whose commission have you?" pursued Radisson.
+
+"No commission--New Englanders," answered the others.
+
+"Contrabands," thought Radisson to himself.  Then he announced that he
+had taken possession of all that country for France, had built a strong
+fort, and expected more ships.  In a word, he advised the New
+Englanders to save themselves by instant flight; but his canoe had
+glided nearer.  To Radisson's surprise, he discovered that the leader
+of the New England poachers was Ben Gillam of Boston, son of Captain
+Gillam, the trusted servant of the Hudson's Bay Company, who had
+opposed Radisson and Groseillers on Rupert's River.  It looked as if
+the contraband might be a venture of the father as well as the son.[9]
+Radisson and young Gillam recognized each other with a show of
+friendliness, Gillam inviting Radisson to inspect the ship with much
+the same motive that the fabled spider invited the fly.  Radisson took
+tactful precaution for his own liberty by graciously asking that two of
+the New England servants go down to the canoe with the three Frenchmen.
+No sooner had Radisson gone on the New England ship than young Gillam
+ordered cannon fired and English flags run up.  Having made that brave
+show of strength, the young man proposed that the French and the New
+Englanders should divide the traffic between them for the winter.
+Radisson diplomatically suggested that such an important proposal be
+laid before his colleagues.  In leaving, he advised Gillam to keep his
+men from wandering beyond the island, lest they suffer wrong at the
+hands of the French soldiers.  Incidentally, that advice would also
+keep the New Englanders from learning how desperately weak the French
+really were.  Neither leader was in the slightest deceived by the
+other; each played for time to take the other unawares, and each knew
+the game that was being played.
+
+[Illustration: Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from Tea
+Chests at York Factory, each Coin representing so many Beaver Skins.]
+
+Instead of returning by the creek that cut athwart the neck of land
+between the two rivers, Radisson decided to go down Nelson River to the
+bay, round the point, and ascend Hayes River to the French quarters.
+Cogitating how to frighten young Gillam out of the country or else to
+seize him, Radisson glided down the swift current of Nelson River
+toward salt water.  He had not gone nine miles from the New Englanders
+when he was astounded by the spectacle of a ship breasting with
+full-blown sails up the tide of the Nelson directly in front of the
+French canoe.  The French dashed for the hiding of the brushwood on
+shore.  From their concealment they saw that the ship was a Hudson's
+Bay Company vessel, armed with cannon and commission for lawful trade.
+If once the Hudson's Bay Company ship and the New Englanders united,
+the English would be strong enough to overpower the French.
+
+The majority of leaders would have escaped the impending disaster by
+taking ingloriously to their heels.  Radisson, with that adroit
+presence of mind which characterized his entire life, had provided for
+his followers' safety by landing them on the south shore, where the
+French could flee across the marsh to the ships if pursued.  Then his
+only thought was how to keep the rivals apart.  Instantly he had an
+enormous bonfire kindled.  Then he posted his followers in ambush.  The
+ship mistook the fire for an Indian signal, reefed its sails, and
+anchored.  Usually natives paddled out to the traders' ships to barter.
+These Indians kept in hiding.  The ship waited for them to come; and
+Radisson waited for the ship's hands to land.  In the morning a gig
+boat was lowered to row ashore.  In it were Captain Gillam, Radisson's
+personal enemy, John Bridgar,[10] the new governor of the Hudson's Bay
+Company for Nelson River, and six sailors.  All were heavily armed, yet
+Radisson stood alone to receive them, with his three companions posted
+on the outskirts of the woods as if in command of ambushed forces.
+Fortune is said to favor the dauntless, and just as the boat came
+within gunshot of the shore, it ran aground.  A sailor jumped out to
+drag the craft up the bank.  They were all at Radisson's mercy--without
+cover.  He at once levelled his gun with a shout of "Halt!"  At the
+same moment his own men made as if to sally from the woods.  The
+English imagined themselves ambushed, and called out that they were the
+officers of the Hudson's Bay Company.  Radisson declared who he was and
+that he had taken possession of the country for France.  His musket was
+still levelled.  His men were ready to dash forward.  The English put
+their heads together and decided that discretion was the better part of
+valor.  Governor Bridgar meekly requested permission to land and salute
+the commander of the French.  Then followed a pompous melodrama of
+bravado, each side affecting sham strength.  Radisson told the English
+all that he had told the New Englanders, going on board the Company's
+ship to dine, while English hostages remained with his French
+followers.  For reasons which he did not reveal, he strongly advised
+Governor Bridgar not to go farther up Nelson River.  Above all, he
+warned Captain Gillam not to permit the English sailors to wander
+inland.  Having exchanged compliments, Radisson took gracious leave of
+his hosts, and with his three men slipped down the Nelson in their
+canoe.  Past a bend in the river, he ordered the canoe ashore.  The
+French then skirted back through the woods and lay watching the English
+till satisfied that the Hudson's Bay Company ship would go no nearer
+the island where Ben Gillam lay hidden.
+
+Groseillers and his son looked after the trade that winter.  Radisson
+had his hands full keeping the two English crews apart.  Ten days after
+his return, he again left Hayes River to see what his rivals were
+doing.  The Hudson's Bay Company ship had gone aground in the ooze a
+mile from the fort where Governor Bridgar had taken up quarters.  That
+division of forces weakened the English fort.  Introducing his man as
+captain of a French ship, Radisson entered the governor's house.  The
+visitors drained a health to their host and fired off muskets to learn
+whether sentinels were on guard.  No attention was paid to the unwonted
+noise.  "I judged," writes Radisson, "that they were careless, and
+might easily be surprised."  He then went across to the river flats,
+where the tide had left the vessel, and, calmly mounting the ladder,
+took a survey of Gillam's ship.  When the irate old captain rushed up
+to know the meaning of the intrusion Radisson suavely proffered
+provisions, of which they were plainly in need.
+
+The New Englanders had been more industrious.  A stoutly palisaded fort
+had been completed on young Gillam's island, and cannon commanded all
+approach.  Radisson fired a musket to notify the sentry, and took care
+to beach his canoe below the range of the guns.  Young Gillam showed a
+less civil front than before.  His lieutenant ironically congratulated
+Radisson on his "safe" return, and invited him to visit the fort if he
+would enter _alone_.  When Radisson would have introduced his four
+followers, the lieutenant swore "if the four French were forty devils,
+they could not take the New Englanders' fort."  The safety of the
+French habitation now hung by a hair.  Everything depended on keeping
+the two English companies apart, and they were distant only nine miles.
+The scheme must have flashed on Radisson in an intuition; for he laid
+his plans as he listened to the boastings of the New Englanders.  If
+father and son could be brought together through Radisson's favor,
+Captain Gillam would keep the English from coming to the New England
+fort lest his son should be seized for poaching on the trade of the
+Company; and Ben Gillam would keep his men from going near the English
+fort lest Governor Bridgar should learn of the contraband ship from
+Boston.  Incidentally, both sides would be prevented from knowing the
+weakness of the French at Fort Bourbon.  At once Radisson told young
+Gillam of his father's presence.  Ben was eager to see his father and,
+as he thought, secure himself from detection in illegal trade.
+Radisson was to return to the old captain with the promised provisions.
+He offered to take young Gillam, disguised as a bush-ranger.  In
+return, he demanded (1) that the New Englanders should not leave their
+fort; (2) that they should not betray themselves by discharging cannon;
+(3) that they shoot any Hudson's Bay Company people who tried to enter
+the New England fort.  To young Gillam these terms seemed designed for
+his own protection.  What they really accomplished was the complete
+protection of the French from united attack.  Father and son would have
+put themselves in Radisson's power.  A word of betrayal to Bridgar, the
+Hudson's Bay governor, and both the Gillams would be arrested for
+illegal trade.  Ben Gillam's visit to his father was fraught with all
+the danger that Radisson's daring could have desired.  A seaman half
+suspected the identity of the bush-ranger, and Governor Bridgar wanted
+to know how Radisson had returned so soon when the French fort was far
+away.  "I told him, smiling," writes Radisson, "that I could fly when
+there was need to serve my friends."
+
+Young Gillam had begun to suspect the weakness of the French.  When the
+two were safely out of the Hudson's Bay Company fort, he offered to go
+home part of the way with Radisson.  This was to learn where the French
+fort lay.  Radisson declined the kindly service and deliberately set
+out from the New Englanders' island in the wrong direction, coming down
+the Nelson past young Gillam's fort at night.  The delay of the trick
+nearly cost Radisson his life.  Fall rains had set in, and the river
+was running a mill-race.  Great floes of ice from the North were
+tossing on the bay at the mouth of the Nelson River in a maelstrom of
+tide and wind.  In the dark Radisson did not see how swiftly his canoe
+had been carried down-stream.  Before he knew it his boat shot out of
+the river among the tossing ice-floes of the bay.  Surrounded by ice in
+a wild sea, he could not get back to land.  The spray drove over the
+canoe till the Frenchman's clothes were stiff with ice.  For four hours
+they lay jammed in the ice-drift till a sudden upheaval crushed the
+canoe to kindling wood and left the men stranded on the ice.  Running
+from floe to floe, they gained the shore and beat their way for three
+days through a raging hurricane of sleet and snow toward the French
+habitation.  They were on the side of the Hayes opposite the French
+fort.  Four _voyageurs_ crossed for them, and the little company at
+last gained the shelter of a roof.
+
+Radisson now knew that young Gillam intended to spy upon the French; so
+he sent scouts to watch the New Englanders' fort.  The scouts reported
+that the young captain had sent messengers to obtain additional men
+from his father; but the New England soldiers, remembering Radisson's
+orders to shoot any one approaching, had levelled muskets to fire at
+the reenforcements.  The rebuffed men had gone back to Governor Bridgar
+with word of a fort and ship only nine miles up Nelson River.  Bridgar
+thought this was the French establishment, and old Captain Gillam could
+not undeceive him.  The Hudson's Bay Company governor had sent the two
+men back to spy on what he thought was a French fort.  At once Radisson
+sent out men to capture Bridgar's scouts, who were found half dead with
+cold and hunger.  The captives reported to Radisson that the English
+ship had been totally wrecked in the ice jam.  Bridgar's people were
+starving.  Many traders would have left their rivals to perish.
+Radisson supplied them with food for the winter.  They were no longer
+to be feared; but there was still danger from young Gillam.  He had
+wished to visit the French fort.  Radisson decided to give him an
+opportunity.  Ben Gillam was escorted down to Hayes River.  A month
+passed quietly.  The young captain had learned that the boasted forces
+of the French consisted of less than thirty men.  His insolence knew no
+bounds.  He struck a French servant, called Radisson a pirate, and
+gathering up his belongings prepared to go home.  Radisson quietly
+barred the young man's way.
+
+"You pitiful dog!" said the Frenchman, coolly.  "You poor young fool!
+Why do you suppose you were brought to this fort?  We brought you here
+because it suited us!  We keep you here as long as it suits us!  We
+take you back when it suits us!"
+
+Ben Gillam was dumfounded to find that he had been trapped, when he had
+all the while thought that he was acting the part of a clever spy.  He
+broke out in a storm of abuse.  Radisson remanded the foolish young man
+to a French guard.  At the mess-room table Radisson addressed his
+prisoner:--
+
+"Gillam, to-day I set out to capture your fort."
+
+At the table sat less than thirty men.  Young Gillam gave one scornful
+glance at the French faces and laughed.
+
+"If you had a hundred men instead of twenty," he jeered.
+
+"How many have you, Ben?"
+
+"Nine; and they'll kill you before you reach the palisades."
+
+Radisson was not talking of killing.
+
+"Gillam," he returned imperturbably, "pick out nine of my men, and I
+have your fort within forty-eight hours."
+
+Gillam chose the company, and Radisson took one of the Hudson Bay
+captives as a witness.  The thing was done as easily as a piece of
+farcical comedy.  French hostages had been left among the New
+Englanders as guarantee of Gillam's safety in Radisson's fort.  These
+hostages had been instructed to drop, as if by chance, blocks of wood
+across the doors of the guard-room and powder house and barracks.  Even
+these precautions proved unnecessary.  Two of Radisson's advance guard,
+who were met by the lieutenant of the New England fort, reported that
+"Gillam had remained behind."  The lieutenant led the two Frenchmen
+into the fort.  These two kept the gates open for Radisson, who marched
+in with his band, unopposed.  The keys were delivered and Radisson was
+in possession.  At midnight the watch-dogs raised an alarm, and the
+French sallied out to find that a New Englander had run to the Hudson's
+Bay Company for aid, and Governor Bridgar's men were attacking the
+ships.  All of the assailants fled but four, whom Radisson caught
+ransacking the ship's cabin.  Radisson now had more captives than he
+could guard, so he loaded the Hudson's Bay Company men with provisions
+and sent them back to their own starving fort.
+
+Radisson left the New England fort in charge of his Frenchmen and
+returned to the French quarters.  Strange news was carried to him
+there.  Bridgar had forgotten all benefits, waited until Radisson's
+back was turned, and, with one last desperate cast of the die to
+retrieve all by capturing the New England fort and ship for the fur
+company, had marched against young Gillam's island.  The French threw
+open the gates for the Hudson's Bay governor to enter.  Then they
+turned the key and told Governor Bridgar that he was a prisoner.  Their
+_coup_ was a complete triumph for Radisson.  Both of his rivals were
+prisoners, and the French flag flew undisputed over Port Nelson.
+
+Spring brought the Indians down to the bay with the winter's hunt.  The
+sight of threescore Englishmen captured by twenty Frenchmen roused the
+war spirit of the young braves.  They offered Radisson two hundred
+beaver skins to be allowed to massacre the English.  Radisson thanked
+the savages for their good will, but declined their offer.  Floods had
+damaged the water-rotted timbers of the two old hulls in which the
+explorers voyaged north.  It was agreed to return to Quebec in Ben
+Gillam's boat.  A vessel was constructed on one of the hulls to send
+the English prisoners to the Hudson's Bay Company forts at the south
+end of the bay.[11]  Young Jean Groseillers was left, with seven men,
+to hold the French post till boats came in the following year.  On the
+27th of July the ships weighed anchor for the homeward voyage.  Young
+Gillam was given a free passage by way of Quebec.  Bridgar was to have
+gone with his men to the Hudson's Bay Company forts at the south of the
+bay, but at the last moment a friendly Englishman warned Radisson that
+the governor's design was to wait till the large ship had left, head
+the bark back for Hayes River, capture the fort, and put the Frenchmen
+to the sword.  To prevent this Bridgar, too, was carried to Quebec.
+Twenty miles out the ship was caught in ice-floes that held her for a
+month, and Bridgar again conspired to cut the throats of the Frenchmen.
+Henceforth young Gillam and Bridgar were out on parole during the day
+and kept under lock at night.
+
+The same jealousy as of old awaited Radisson at Quebec.  The Company of
+the North was furious that La Chesnaye had sent ships to Hudson Bay,
+which the shareholders considered to be their territory by license.[12]
+Farmers of the Revenue beset the ship to seize the cargo, because the
+explorers had gone North without a permit.  La Chesnaye saved some of
+the furs by transshipping them for France before the vessel reached
+Quebec.  Then followed an interminable lawsuit, that exhausted the
+profits of the voyage.  La Barre had succeeded Frontenac as governor.
+The best friends of La Barre would scarcely deny that his sole ambition
+as governor was to amass a fortune from the fur trade of Canada.
+Inspired by the jealous Company of the North, he refused to grant
+Radisson prize money for the capture of the contraband ship, restored
+the vessel to Gillam, and gave him clearance to sail for Boston.[13]
+For this La Barre was sharply reprimanded from France; but the
+reprimand did not mend the broken fortunes of the two explorers, who
+had given their lives for the extension of the French domain.[14]  M.
+Colbert summoned Radisson and Groseillers to return to France and give
+an account of all they had done; but when they arrived in Paris, on
+January 15, 1684, they learned that the great statesman had died.  Lord
+Preston, the English envoy, had lodged such complaints against them for
+the defeat of the Englishmen in Hudson Bay, that France hesitated to
+extend public recognition of their services.
+
+
+[1] Within ten years so many different regulations were promulgated on
+the fur trade that it is almost impossible to keep track of them.  In
+1673 orders came from Paris forbidding French settlers of New France
+from wandering in the woods for longer than twenty-four hours.  In 1672
+M. Frontenac forbade the selling of merchandise to _coureurs du bois_,
+or the purchase of furs from them.  In 1675 a decree of the Council of
+State awarded to M. Jean Oudiette one-fourth of all beaver, with the
+exclusive right of buying and selling in Canada.  In 1676 Frontenac
+withdrew from the _Cie Indes Occidentales_ all the rights it had over
+Canada and other places.  An ordinance of October 1, 1682, forbade all
+trade except under license.  An ordinance in 1684 ordered all fur
+traders trading in Hudson Bay to pay one-fourth to Farmers of the
+Revenue.
+
+[2] It is hard to tell who this Godefroy was.  Of all the famous
+Godefroys of Three Rivers (according to Abbe Tanguay) there was only
+one, Jean Batiste, born 1658, who might have gone with Radisson; but I
+hardly think so.  The Godefroys descended from the French nobility and
+themselves bore titles from the king, but in spite of this, were the
+best canoemen of New France, as ready--according to Mr. Sulte--to
+_faire la cuisine_ as to command a fort.  Radisson's Godefroy evidently
+went in the capacity of a servant, for his name is not mentioned in the
+official list of promoters.  On the other hand, parish records do not
+give the date of Jean Batiste Godefroy's death; so that he may have
+gone as a servant and died in the North.
+
+[3] State Papers, 1683, state that Dame Sorel, La Chesnaye, Chaujon,
+Gitton, Foret, and others advanced money for the goods.
+
+[4] In 1898, when up the coast of Labrador, I was told by the
+superintendent of a northern whaling station--a man who has received
+royal decorations for his scientific research of ocean phenomena--that
+he has frequently seen icebergs off Labrador that were nine miles long.
+
+[5] Jean was born in 1654 and was, therefore, twenty-eight.
+
+[6] I have written both addresses as the Indians would chant them.  To
+be sure, they will not scan according to the elephantine grace of the
+pedant's iambics; but then, neither will the Indian songs scan, though
+I know of nothing more subtly rhythmical.  Rhythm is so much a part of
+the Indian that it is in his walk, in the intonation of his words, in
+the gesture of his hands.  I think most Westerners will bear me out in
+saying that it is the exquisitely musical intonation of words that
+betrays Indian blood to the third and fourth generation.
+
+[7] See Robson's map.
+
+[8] State Papers: "The Governor of New England is ordered to seize all
+vessels trading in Hudson Bay contrary to charter--"
+
+[9] _Radisson's Journal_, p. 277.
+
+[10] Robson gives the commission to this governor.
+
+[11] Later in Hudson Bay history, when another commander captured the
+forts, the prisoners were sold into slavery.  Radisson's treatment of
+his rivals hardly substantiates all the accusations of rascality
+trumped up against him.  Just how many prisoners he took in this
+_coup_, no two records agree.
+
+[12] Archives, September 24, 1683: Ordinance of M. de Meulles regarding
+the claims of persons interested in the expedition to Hudson Bay,
+organized by M. de la Chesnaye, Gitton, Bruneau, Mme. Sorel. . . .  In
+order to avoid difficulties with the Company of the North, they had
+placed a vessel at Isle Percee to receive the furs brought back . . .
+and convey them to Holland and Spain. . . .  Joachims de Chalons, agent
+of the Company of the North, sent a _bateau_ to Percee to defeat the
+project.  De la Chesnaye, summoned to appear before the intendant,
+maintained that the company had no right to this trade, . . . that the
+enterprise involved so many risks that he could not consent to divide
+the profits, if he had any.  The partners having been heard, M. de
+Meulles orders that the boats from Hudson Bay be anchored at Quebec.
+
+[13] Archives, October 25, 1683: M. de la Barre grants Benjamin Gillam
+of Boston clearance for the ship _Le Garcon_, now in port at Quebec,
+although he had no license from his Britannic Majesty permitting him to
+enter Hudson Bay.
+
+[14] Such foundationless accusations have been written against Radisson
+by historians who ought to have known better, about these furs, that I
+quote the final orders of the government on the subject: November 5,
+1683, M. de la Barre forbids Chalons, agent of La Ferme du Canada,
+confiscating the furs brought from Hudson Bay; November 8 M. de la
+Chesnaye is to be paid for the furs seized.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+1684-1710
+
+THE LAST VOYAGE OF RADISSON TO HUDSON BAY
+
+France refuses to restore the Confiscated Furs and Radisson tries to
+redeem his Fortune--Reengaged by England, he captures back Fort Nelson,
+but comes to Want in his Old Age--his Character
+
+
+Radisson was now near his fiftieth year.  He had spent his entire life
+exploring the wilds.  He had saved New France from bankruptcy with
+cargoes of furs that in four years amounted to half a million of modern
+money.  In ten years he had brought half a million dollars worth of
+furs to the English company.[1]  Yet he was a poor man, threatened with
+the sponging-house by clamorous creditors and in the power of
+avaricious statesmen, who used him as a tool for their own schemes.  La
+Chesnaye had saved his furs; but the half of the cargo that was the
+share of Radisson and Groseillers had been seized at Quebec.[2] On
+arriving in France, Groseillers presented a memorial of their wrong to
+the court.[3]  Probably because England and France were allied by
+treaty at that time, the petition for redress was ignored.  Groseillers
+was now an old man.  He left the struggle to Radisson and retired to
+spend his days in quietness.[4]  Radisson did not cease to press his
+claim for the return of confiscated furs.  He had a wife and four
+children to support; but, in spite of all his services to England and
+France, he did not own a shilling's worth of property in the whole
+world.  From January to May he waited for the tardy justice of the
+French court.  When his suit became too urgent, he was told that he had
+offended the Most Christian King by attacking the fur posts under the
+protection of a friendly monarch, King Charles.  The hollowness of that
+excuse became apparent when the French government sanctioned the
+fitting out of two vessels for Radisson to go to Hudson Bay in the
+spring.  Lord Preston, the English ambassador, was also playing a
+double game.  He never ceased to reproach the French for the
+destruction of the fur posts on Hudson Bay.  At the same time he
+besieged Radisson with offers to return to the service of the Hudson's
+Bay Company.
+
+Radisson was deadly tired of the farce.  From first to last France had
+treated him with the blackest injustice.  If he had wished to be rich,
+he could long ago have accumulated wealth by casting in his lot with
+the dishonest rulers of Quebec.  In England a strong clique, headed by
+Bridgar, Gillam, and Bering opposed him; but King Charles and the Duke
+of York, Prince Rupert, when he was alive, Sir William Young, Sir James
+Hayes, and Sir John Kirke were in his favor.  His heart yearned for his
+wife and children.  Just then letters came from England urging him to
+return to the Hudson's Bay Company.  Lord Preston plied the explorer
+with fair promises.  Under threat of punishment for molesting the
+English of Hudson Bay, the French government tried to force him into a
+contract to sail on a second voyage to the North on the same terms as
+in 1682-1683--not to share the profits.  England and France were both
+playing double.  Radisson smiled a grim smile and took his resolution.
+Daily he conferred with the French Marine on details of the voyage.  He
+permitted the date of sailing to be set for April 24.  Sailors were
+enlisted, stores put on board, everything was in readiness.  At the
+last moment, Radisson asked leave of absence to say good-by to his
+family.  The request was granted.  Without losing a moment, he sailed
+for England, where he arrived on the 10th of May and was at once taken
+in hand by Sir William Young and Sir James Hayes.  He was honored as
+his explorations entitled him to be.  King Charles and the Duke of York
+received him.  Both royal brothers gave him gifts in token of
+appreciation.  He took the oath of fealty and cast in his lot with the
+English for good.  It was characteristic of the enthusiast that he was,
+when Radisson did not sign a strictly business contract with the
+Hudson's Bay Company.  "I accepted their commission with the greatest
+pleasure in the world," he writes; ". . . without any precautions on my
+part for my own interests . . . since they had confidence in me, I
+wished to be generous towards them . . . in the hope they would render
+me all the justice due from gentlemen of honor and probity."
+
+But to the troubles of the future Radisson always paid small heed.
+Glad to be off once more to the adventurous freedom of the wilds, he
+set sail from England on May 17, 1684, in the _Happy Return_,
+accompanied by two other vessels.  No incident marked the voyage till
+the ships had passed through the straits and were driven apart by the
+ice-drift of the bay.  About sixty miles out from Port Nelson, the
+_Happy Return_ was held back by ice.  Fearing trouble between young
+Jean Groseillers' men and the English of the other ships, Radisson
+embarked in a shallop with seven men in order to arrive at Hayes River
+before the other boats came.  Rowing with might and main for
+forty-eight hours, they came to the site of the French fort.
+
+The fort had been removed.  Jean Groseillers had his own troubles
+during Radisson's absence.  A few days after Radisson's departure in
+July, 1683, cannon announced the arrival of the annual English ships on
+Nelson River.  Jean at once sent out scouts, who found a tribe of
+Indians on the way home from trading with the ships that had fired the
+cannon.  The scouts brought the Indians back to the French fort.  Young
+Groseillers admitted the savages only one at a time; but the cunning
+braves pretended to run back for things they had forgotten in the
+French house.  Suspecting nothing, Jean had permitted his own men to
+leave the fort.  On different pretexts, a dozen warriors had surrounded
+the young trader.  Suddenly the mask was thrown off.  Springing up,
+treacherous as a tiger cat, the chief of the band struck at Groseillers
+with a dagger.  Jean parried the blow, grabbed the redskin by his
+collar of bears' claws strung on thongs, threw the assassin to the
+ground almost strangling him, and with one foot on the villain's throat
+and the sword point at his chest, demanded of the Indians what they
+meant.  The savages would have fled, but French soldiers who had heard
+the noise dashed to Groseillers' aid.  The Indians threw down their
+weapons and confessed all: the Englishmen of the ship had promised the
+band a barrel of powder to massacre the French.  Jean took his foot
+from the Indian's throat and kicked him out of the fort.  The English
+outnumbered the French; so Jean removed his fort farther from the bay,
+among the Indians, where the English could not follow.  To keep the
+warriors about him, he offered to house and feed them for the winter.
+This protected him from the attacks of the English.  In the spring
+Indians came to the French with pelts.  Jean was short of firearms; so
+he bribed the Indians to trade their peltries to the English for guns,
+and to retrade the guns to him for other goods.  It was a stroke worthy
+of Radisson himself, and saved the little French fort.  The English
+must have suspected the young trader's straits, for they again paid
+warriors to attack the French; but Jean had forestalled assault by
+forming an alliance with the Assiniboines, who came down Hayes River
+from Lake Winnipeg four hundred strong, and encamped a body-guard
+around the fort.  Affairs were at this stage when Radisson arrived with
+news that he had transferred his services to the English.
+
+Young Groseillers was amazed.[5]  Letters to his mother show that he
+surrendered his charge with a very ill grace.  "Do not forget,"
+Radisson urged him, "the injuries that France has inflicted on your
+father."  Young Groseillers' mother, Marguerite Hayet, was in want at
+Three Rivers.[6]  It was memory of her that now turned the scales with
+the young man.  He would turn over the furs to Radisson for the English
+Company, if Radisson would take care of the far-away mother at Three
+Rivers.  The bargain was made, and the two embraced.  The surrender of
+the French furs to the English Company has been represented as
+Radisson's crowning treachery.  Under that odium the great discoverer's
+name has rested for nearly three centuries; yet the accusation of theft
+is without a grain of truth.  Radisson and Groseillers were to obtain
+half the proceeds of the voyage in 1682-1683.  Neither the explorers
+nor Jean Groseillers, who had privately invested 500 pounds in the
+venture, ever received one sou.  The furs at Port Nelson--or Fort
+Bourbon--belonged to the Frenchmen, to do what they pleased with them.
+The act of the enthusiast is often tainted with folly.  That Radisson
+turned over twenty thousand beaver pelts to the English, without the
+slightest assurance that he would be given adequate return, was surely
+folly; but it was not theft.
+
+The transfer of all possessions to the English was promptly made.
+Radisson then arranged a peace treaty between the Indians and the
+English.  That peace treaty has endured between the Indians and the
+Hudson's Bay Company to this day.  A new fort was built, the furs
+stored in the hold of the vessels, and the crews mustered for the
+return voyage.  Radisson had been given a solemn promise by the
+Hudson's Bay Company that Jean Groseillers and his comrades should be
+well treated and reengaged for the English at 100 pounds a year.  Now
+he learned that the English intended to ship all the French out of
+Hudson Bay and to keep them out.  The enthusiast had played his game
+with more zeal than discretion.  The English had what they wanted--furs
+and fort.  In return, Radisson had what had misled him like a
+will-o'-the-wisp all his life--vague promises.  In vain Radisson
+protested that he had given his promise to the French before they
+surrendered the fort.  The English distrusted foreigners.  The
+Frenchmen had been mustered on the ships to receive last instructions.
+They were told that they were to be taken to England.  No chance was
+given them to escape.  Some of the French had gone inland with the
+Indians.  Of Jean's colony, these alone remained.  When Radisson
+realized the conspiracy, he advised his fellow-countrymen to make no
+resistance; for he feared that some of the English bitter against him
+might seize on the pretext of a scuffle to murder the French.  His
+advice proved wise.  He had strong friends at the English court, and
+atonement was made for the breach of faith to the French.
+
+The ships set sail on the 4th of September and arrived in England on
+the 23d of October.  Without waiting for the coach, Radisson hired a
+horse and spurred to London in order to give his version first of the
+quarrel on the bay.  The Hudson's Bay Company was delighted with the
+success of Radisson.  He was taken before the directors, given a
+present of a hundred guineas, and thanked for his services.  He was
+once more presented to the King and the Duke of York.  The company
+redeemed its promise to Radisson by employing the Frenchmen of the
+surrendered fort and offering to engage young Groseillers at 100 pounds
+a year.[7]
+
+[Illustration: Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower
+Fort Garry, Red River.  (Courtesy of C. C. Chipman, Commissioner H. B.
+Company.)]
+
+For five years the English kept faith with Radisson, and he made annual
+voyages to the bay; but war broke out with France.  New France entered
+on a brilliant campaign against the English of Hudson Bay.  The
+company's profits fell.  Radisson, the Frenchman, was distrusted.
+France had set a price on his head, and one Martiniere went to Port
+Nelson to seize him, but was unable to cope with the English.  At no
+time did Radisson's salary with the company exceed 100 pounds; and now,
+when war stopped dividends on the small amount of stock which had been
+given to him, he fell into poverty and debt.  In 1692 Sir William Young
+petitioned the company in his favor; but a man with a price on his head
+for treason could plainly not return to France.[8]  The French were in
+possession of the bay.  Radisson could do no harm to the English.
+Therefore the company ignored him till he sued them and received
+payment in full for arrears of salary and dividends on stock which he
+was not permitted to sell; but 50 pounds a year would not support a man
+who paid half that amount for rent, and had a wife, four children, and
+servants to support.  In 1700 Radisson applied for the position of
+warehouse keeper for the company at London.  Even this was denied.
+
+The dauntless pathfinder was growing old; and the old cannot fight and
+lose and begin again as Radisson had done all his life.  State Papers
+of Paris contain records of a Radisson with Tonty at Detroit![9]  Was
+this his nephew, Francois Radisson's son, who took the name of the
+explorer, or Radisson's own son, or the game old warrior himself, come
+out to die on the frontier as he had lived?
+
+History is silent.  Until the year 1710 Radisson drew his allowance of
+50 pounds a year from the English Company, then the payments stopped.
+Did the dauntless life stop too?  Oblivion hides all record of his
+death, as it obscured the brilliant achievements of his life.
+
+
+There is no need to point out Radisson's faults.  They are written on
+his life without extenuation or excuse, so that all may read.  There is
+less need to eulogize his virtues.  They declare themselves in every
+act of his life.  This, only, should be remembered.  Like all
+enthusiasts, Radisson could not have been a hero, if he had not been a
+bit of a fool.  If he had not had his faults, if he had not been as
+impulsive, as daring, as reckless, as inconstant, as improvident of the
+morrow, as a savage or a child, he would not have accomplished the
+exploration of half a continent.  Men who weigh consequences are not of
+the stuff to win empires.  Had Radisson haggled as to the means, he
+would have missed or muddled the end.  He went ahead; and when the way
+did not open, he went round, or crawled over, or carved his way through.
+
+There was an old saying among retired hunters of Three Rivers that "one
+learned more in the woods than was ever found in l' petee
+cat-ee-cheesm."  Radisson's training was of the woods, rather than the
+cure's catechism; yet who that has been trained to the strictest code
+may boast of as dauntless faults and noble virtues?  He was not
+faithful to any country, but he was faithful to his wife and children;
+and he was "faithful to his highest hope,"--that of becoming a
+discoverer,--which is more than common mortals are to their meanest
+aspirations.  When statesmen played him a double game, he paid them
+back in their own coin with compound interest.  Perhaps that is why
+they hated him so heartily and blackened his memory.  But amid all the
+mad license of savage life, Radisson remained untainted.  Other
+explorers and statesmen, too, have left a trail of blood to perpetuate
+their memory; Radisson never once spilled human blood needlessly, and
+was beloved by the savages.
+
+Memorial tablets commemorate other discoverers.  Radisson needs none.
+The Great Northwest is his monument for all time.
+
+
+[1] Radisson's petition to the Hudson's Bay Company gives these amounts.
+
+[2] See State Papers quoted in Chapter VI.  I need scarcely add that
+Radisson did not steal a march on his patrons by secretly shipping furs
+to Europe.  This is only another of the innumerable slanders against
+Radisson which State Papers disprove.
+
+[3] It seems impossible that historians with the slightest regard for
+truth should have branded this part of _Radisson's Relation_ as a
+fabrication, too.  Yet such is the case, and of writers whose books are
+supposed to be reputable.  Since parts of Radisson's life appeared in
+the magazines, among many letters I received one from a well-known
+historian which to put it mildly was furious at the acceptance of
+_Radisson's Journal_ as authentic.  In reply, I asked that historian
+how many documents contemporaneous with Radisson's life he had
+consulted before he branded so great an explorer as Radisson as a liar.
+Needless to say, that question was not answered.  In corroboration of
+this part of Radisson's life, I have lying before me: (1) Chouart's
+letters--see Appendix.  (2) A letter of Frontenac recording Radisson's
+first trip by boat for De la Chesnaye and the complications it would be
+likely to cause.  (3) A complete official account sent from Quebec to
+France of Radisson's doings in the bay, which tallies in every respect
+with _Radisson's Journal_.  (4) Report of M. de Meulles to the Minister
+on the whole affair with the English and New Englanders.  (5) An
+official report on the release of Gillam's boat at Quebec.  (6) The
+memorial presented by Groseillers to the French minister.  (7) An
+official statement of the first discovery of the bay overland.  (8) A
+complete statement (official) of the complications created by
+Radisson's wife being English.  (9) A statement through a third
+party--presumably an official--by Radisson himself of these
+complications dated 1683.  (10) A letter from the king to the governor
+at Quebec retailing the English complaints of Radisson at Nelson River.
+
+In the face of this, what is to be said of the historian who calls
+Radisson's adventures "a fabrication"?  Such misrepresentation betrays
+about equal amounts of impudence and ignorance.
+
+[4] From Charlevoix to modern writers mention is made of the death of
+these two explorers.  Different names are given as the places where
+they died.  This is all pure supposition.  Therefore I do not quote.
+No records exist to prove where Radisson and Groseillers died.
+
+[5] See Appendix.
+
+[6] State Papers record payment of money to her because she was in want.
+
+[7] Dr. George Bryce, who is really the only scholar who has tried to
+unravel the mystery of Radisson's last days, supplies new facts about
+his dealings with the Company to 1710.
+
+[8] Marquis de Denonville ordered the arrest of Radisson wherever he
+might be found.
+
+[9] Appendix; see State Papers.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA: BEING AN
+  ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE ROCKY
+  MOUNTAINS, THE MISSOURI UPLANDS, AND THE
+  VALLEY OF THE SASKATCHEWAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+1730-1750
+
+THE SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA[1]
+
+M. de la Verendrye continues the Exploration of the Great Northwest by
+establishing a Chain of Fur Posts across the Continent--Privations of
+the Explorers and the Massacre of Twenty Followers--His Sons visit the
+Mandans and discover the Rockies--The Valley of the Saskatchewan is
+next explored, but Jealousy thwarts the Explorer, and he dies in Poverty
+
+
+I
+
+1731-1736
+
+A curious paradox is that the men who have done the most for North
+America did not intend to do so.  They set out on the far quest of a
+crack-brained idealist's dream.  They pulled up at a foreshortened
+purpose; but the unaccomplished aim did more for humanity than the
+idealist's dream.
+
+Columbus set out to find Asia.  He discovered America.  Jacques Cartier
+sought a mythical passage to the Orient.  He found a northern empire.
+La Salle thought to reach China.  He succeeded only in exploring the
+valley of the Mississippi, but the new continent so explored has done
+more for humanity than Asia from time immemorial.  Of all crack-brained
+dreams that led to far-reaching results, none was wilder than the
+search for the Western Sea.  Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had
+followed the trail that Radisson had blazed and explored the valley of
+the Mississippi; but like a will-o'-the-wisp beckoning ever westward
+was that undiscovered myth, the Western Sea, thought to lie like a
+narrow strait between America and Japan.
+
+The search began in earnest one sweltering afternoon on June 8, 1731,
+at the little stockaded fort on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where
+Montreal stands to-day.  Fifty grizzled adventurers--wood runners,
+voyageurs, Indian interpreters--bareheaded, except for the colored
+handkerchief binding back the lank hair, dressed in fringed buckskin,
+and chattering with the exuberant nonchalance of boys out of school,
+had finished gumming the splits of their ninety-foot birch canoes, and
+now stood in line awaiting the coming of their captain, Sieur Pierre
+Gaultier de Varennes de la Verendrye.  The French soldier with his
+three sons, aged respectively eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen, now
+essayed to discover the fabled Western Sea, whose narrow waters were
+supposed to be between the valley of the "Great Forked River" and the
+Empire of China.
+
+[Illustration: Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight.]
+
+Certainly, if it were worth while for Peter the Great of Russia to send
+Vitus Bering coasting the bleak headlands of ice-blocked, misty shores
+to find the Western Sea, it would--as one of the French governors
+reported--"be nobler than open war" for the little colony of New France
+to discover this "sea of the setting sun."  The quest was invested with
+all the rainbow tints of "_la gloire_"; but the rainbow hopes were
+founded on the practical basis of profits.  Leading merchants of
+Montreal had advanced goods for trade with the Indians on the way to
+the Western Sea.  Their expectations of profits were probably the same
+as the man's who buys a mining share for ten cents and looks for
+dividends of several thousand per cent.  And the fur trade at that time
+was capable of yielding such profits.  Traders had gone West with less
+than $2000 worth of goods in modern money, and returned three years
+later with a sheer profit of a quarter of a million.  Hope of such
+returns added zest to De la Verendrye's venture for the discovery of
+the Western Sea.
+
+Goods done up in packets of a hundred pounds lay at the feet of the
+_voyageurs_ awaiting De la Verendrye's command.  A dozen soldiers in
+the plumed hats, slashed buskins, the brightly colored doublets of the
+period, joined the motley company.  Priests came out to bless the
+departing _voyageurs_.  Chapel bells rang out their God-speed.  To the
+booming of cannon, and at a word from De la Verendrye, the gates
+opened.  Falling in line with measured tread, the soldiers marched out
+from Mount Royal.  Behind, in the ambling gait of the moccasined
+woodsman, came the _voyageurs_ and _coureurs_ and interpreters,
+pack-straps across their foreheads, packets on the bent backs, the long
+birch canoes hoisted to the shoulders of four men, two abreast at each
+end, heads hidden in the inverted keel.
+
+The path led between the white fret of Lachine Rapids and the dense
+forests that shrouded the base of Mount Royal.  Checkerboard squares of
+farm patches had been cleared in the woods.  La Salle's old
+thatch-roofed seigniory lay not far back from the water.  St. Anne's
+was the launching place for fleets of canoes that were to ascend the
+Ottawa.  Here, a last look was taken of splits and seams in the birch
+keels.  With invocations of St. Anne in one breath, and invocations of
+a personage not mentioned in the cure's "petee cat-ee-cheesm" in the
+next breath, and imprecations that their "souls might be smashed on the
+end of a picket fence,"--the _voyageur's_ common oath even to this
+day,--the boatmen stored goods fore, aft, and athwart till each long
+canoe sank to the gunwale as it was gently pushed out on the water.  A
+last sign of the cross, and the lithe figures leap light as a mountain
+cat to their place in the canoes.  There are four benches of paddlers,
+two abreast, with bowman and steersman, to each canoe.  One can guess
+that the explorer and his sons and his nephew, Sieur de la Jemmeraie,
+who was to be second in command, all unhatted as they heard the long
+last farewell of the bells.  Every eye is fastened on the chief
+bowman's steel-shod pole, held high--there is silence but for the
+bells--the bowman's pole is lowered--as with one stroke out sweep the
+paddles in a poetry of motion.  The chimes die away over the water, the
+chapel spire gleams--it, too, is gone.  Some one strikes up a plaintive
+ditty,--the _voyageur's_ song of the lost lady and the faded roses, or
+the dying farewell of Cadieux, the hunter, to his comrades,--and the
+adventurers are launched for the Western Sea.
+
+[Illustration: Fight at the Foot-hills of the Rockies between Crows and
+Snakes.]
+
+
+II
+
+1731-1736
+
+Every mile westward was consecrated by heroism.  There was the place
+where Cadieux, the white hunter, went ashore single-handed to hold the
+Iroquois at bay, while his comrades escaped by running the rapids; but
+Cadieux was assailed by a subtler foe than the Iroquois, _la folie des
+bois_,--the folly of the woods,--that sends the hunter wandering in
+endless circles till he dies from hunger; and when his companions
+returned, Cadieux lay in eternal sleep with a death chant scribbled on
+bark across his breast.  There were the Rapids of the Long Sault where
+Dollard and seventeen Frenchmen fought seven hundred Iroquois till
+every white man fell.  Not one of all De la Verendrye's fifty followers
+but knew that perils as great awaited him.
+
+Streaked foam told the voyageurs where they were approaching rapids.
+Alert as a hawk, the bowman stroked for the shore; and his stroke was
+answered by all paddles.  If the water were high enough to carry the
+canoes above rocks, and the rapids were not too violent, several of the
+boatmen leaped out to knees in water, and "tracked" the canoes up
+stream; but this was unusual with loaded craft.  The bowman steadied
+the beached keel.  Each man landed with pack on his back, lighted his
+pipe, and trotted away over portages so dank and slippery that only a
+moccasined foot could gain hold.  On long portages, camp-fires were
+kindled and the kettles slung on the crotched sticks for the evening
+meal.  At night, the voyageurs slept under the overturned canoes, or
+lay on the sand with bare faces to the sky.  Morning mist had not risen
+till all the boats were once more breasting the flood of the Ottawa.
+For a month the canoe prows met the current when a portage lifted the
+fleet out of the Ottawa into a shallow stream flowing toward Lake
+Nipissing, and from Lake Nipissing to Lake Huron.  The change was a
+welcome relief.  The canoes now rode with the current; and when a wind
+sprang up astern, blanket sails were hoisted that let the boatmen lie
+back, paddles athwart.  Going with the stream, the _voyageurs_ would
+"run"--"_sauter les rapides_"--the safest of the cataracts.  Bowman,
+not steersman, was the pilot of such "runs."  A faint, far swish as of
+night wind, little forward leaps and swirls of the current, the blur of
+trees  on  either bank, were signs to the bowman.  He rose in his
+place.  A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream--the
+rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below--the
+bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his
+horse to the leap; a sudden splash--the thing has happened--the canoe
+has run the rapids or shot the falls.
+
+[Illustration:  "Each man landed with pack on his back, and trotted
+away over portages."]
+
+Pause was made at Lake Huron for favorable weather; and a rear wind
+would carry the canoes at a bouncing pace clear across to
+Michilimackinac, at the mouth of Lake Michigan.  This was the chief fur
+post of the lakes at that time.  All the boats bound east or west,
+Sioux and Cree and Iroquois and Fox, traders' and priests' and
+outlaws'--stopped at Michilimackinac.  Vice and brandy and religion
+were the characteristics of the fort.
+
+[Illustration: A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands.]
+
+This was familiar ground to De la Verendrye.  It was at the lonely fur
+post of Nepigon, north of Michilimackinac, in the midst of a wilderness
+forest, that he had eaten his heart out with baffled ambition from 1728
+to 1730, when he descended to Montreal to lay before M. de Beauharnois,
+the governor, plans for the discovery of the Western Sea.  Born at
+Three Rivers in 1686, where the passion for discovery and Radisson's
+fame were in the very air and traders from the wilderness of the Upper
+Country wintered, young Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Verendrye, at
+the ambitious age of fourteen, determined that he would become a
+discoverer.[2]  At eighteen he was fighting in New England, at nineteen
+in Newfoundland, at twenty-three in Europe at the battle of Malplaquet,
+where he was carried off the field with nine wounds.  Eager for more
+distinguished service, he returned to Canada in his twenty-seventh
+year, only to find himself relegated to an obscure trading post in far
+Northern wilds.  Then the boyhood ambitions reawakened.  All France and
+Canada, too, were ringing with projects for the discovery of the
+Western Sea.  Russia was acting.  France knew it.  The great priest
+Charlevoix had been sent to Canada to investigate plans for the
+venture, and had recommended an advance westward through the country of
+the Sioux; but the Sioux[3] swarmed round the little fort at Lake Pepin
+on the Mississippi like angry wasps.  That way, exploration was plainly
+barred.  Nothing came of the attempt except a brisk fur trade and a
+brisker warfare on the part of the Sioux.  At the lonely post of
+Nepigon, vague Indian tales came to De la Verendrye of "a great river
+flowing west" and "a vast, flat country devoid of timber" with "large
+herds of cattle."  Ochagach, an old Indian, drew maps on birch bark
+showing rivers that emptied into the Western Sea.  De la Verendrye's
+smouldering ambitions kindled.  He hurried to Michilimackinac.  There
+the traders and Indians told the same story.  Glory seemed suddenly
+within De la Verendrye's grasp.  Carried away with the passion for
+discovery that ruled his age, he took passage in the canoes bound for
+Quebec.  The Marquis Charles de Beauharnois had become governor.  His
+brother Claude had taken part in the exploration of the Mississippi.
+The governor favored the project of the Western Sea.  Perhaps Russia's
+activity gave edge to the governor's zest; but he promised De la
+Verendrye the court's patronage and prestige.  This was not money.
+France would not advance the enthusiast one sou, but granted him a
+monopoly of the fur trade in the countries which he might discover.
+The winter of 1731-1732 was spent by De la Verendrye as the guest of
+the governor at Chateau St. Louis, arranging with merchants to furnish
+goods for trade; and on May 19 the agreement was signed.  By a lucky
+coincidence, the same winter that M. de la Verendrye had come down to
+Quebec, there had arrived from the Mississippi fort, his nephew,
+Christopher Dufrost, Sieur de la Jemmeraie, who had commanded the Sioux
+post and been prisoner among the Indians.  So M. de la Verendrye chose
+Jemmeraie for lieutenant.
+
+And now the explorer was back at Michilimackinac, on the way to the
+accomplishment of the daring ambition of his life.  The trip from
+Montreal had fatigued the _voyageurs_.  Brandy flowed at the lake post
+freely as at a modern mining camp.  The explorer kept military
+discipline over his men.  They received no pay which could be
+squandered away on liquor.  Discontent grew rife.  Taking Father
+Messaiger, the Jesuit, as chaplain, M. de la Verendrye ordered his
+grumbling _voyageurs_ to their canoes, and, passing through the Straits
+of the Sault, headed his fleet once more for the Western Sea.  Other
+explorers had preceded him on this part of the route.  The Jesuits had
+coasted the north shore of Lake Superior.  So had Radisson.  In 1688 De
+Noyon of Three Rivers had gone as far west as the Lake of the Woods
+towards what is now Minnesota and Manitoba; and in 1717 De Lanoue had
+built a fur post at Kaministiquia, near what is now Fort William on
+Lake Superior.  The shore was always perilous to the boatman of frail
+craft.  The harbors were fathoms deep, and the waves thrashed by a
+cross wind often proved as dangerous as the high sea.  It took M. de la
+Verendrye's canoemen a month to coast from the Straits of Mackinaw to
+Kaministiquia, which they reached on the 26th of August, seventy-eight
+days after they had left Montreal.  The same distance is now traversed
+in two days.
+
+Prospects were not encouraging.  The crews were sulky.  Kaministiquia
+was the outermost post in the West.  Within a month, the early Northern
+winter would set in.  One hunter can scramble for his winter's food
+where fifty will certainly starve; and the Indians could not be
+expected back from the chase with supplies of furs and food till
+spring.  The canoemen had received no pay.  Free as woodland denizens,
+they chafed under military command.  Boats were always setting out at
+this season for the homeland hamlets of the St. Lawrence; and perhaps
+other hunters told De la Verendrye's men that this Western Sea was a
+will-o'-the-wisp that would lead for leagues and leagues over strange
+lands, through hostile tribes, to a lonely death in the wilderness.
+When the explorer ordered his men once more in line to launch for the
+Western Sea, there was outright mutiny.  Soldiers and boatmen refused
+to go on.  The Jesuit Messaiger threatened and expostulated with the
+men.  Jemmeraie, who had been among the Sioux, interceded with the
+_voyageurs_.  A compromise was effected.  Half the boatmen would go
+ahead with Jemmeraie if M. de la Verendrye would remain with the other
+half at Lake Superior as a rear guard for retreat and the supply of
+provisions.  So the explorer suffered his first check in the advance to
+the Western Sea.
+
+
+III
+
+1732-1736
+
+Equipping four canoes, Lieutenant de la Jemmeraie and young Jean
+Ba'tiste de la Verendrye set out with thirty men from Kaministiquia,
+_portaged_ through dense forests over moss and dank rock past the high
+cataract of the falls, and launched westward to prepare a fort for the
+reception of their leader in spring.  Before winter had closed
+navigation, Fort St. Pierre--named in honor of the explorer--had been
+erected on the left bank or Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, and the two
+young men not only succeeded in holding their mutinous followers, but
+drove a thriving trade in furs with the Crees.  Perhaps the furs were
+obtained at too great cost, for ammunition and firearms were the price
+paid, but the same mistake has been made at a later day for a lesser
+object than the discovery of the Western Sea.  The spring of 1732 saw
+the young men back at Lake Superior, going post-haste to
+Michilimackinac to exchange furs for the goods from Montreal.
+
+On the 8th of June, exactly a year from the day that he had left
+Montreal, M. de la Verendrye pushed forward with all his people for
+Fort St. Pierre.  Five weeks later he was welcomed inside the
+stockades.  Uniformed soldiers were a wonder to the awe-struck Crees,
+who hung round the gateway with hands over their hushed lips.  Gifts of
+ammunition won the loyalty of the chiefs.  Not to be lacking in
+generosity, the Indians collected fifty of their gaudiest canoes and
+offered to escort the explorer west to the Lake of the Woods.  De la
+Verendrye could not miss such an offer.  Though his _voyageurs_ were
+fatigued, he set out at once.  He had reached Fort St. Pierre on July
+14.  In August his entire fleet glided over the Lake of the Woods.  The
+threescore canoes manned by the Cree boatmen threaded the shadowy
+defiles and labyrinthine channels of the Lake of the Woods--or Lake of
+the Isles--coasting island after island along the south or Minnesota
+shore westward to the opening of the river at the northwest angle.
+This was the border of the Sioux territory.  Before the boatmen opened
+the channel of an unknown river.  Around them were sheltered harbors,
+good hunting, and good fishing.  The Crees favored this region for
+winter camping ground because they could hide their families from the
+Sioux on the sheltered islands of the wooded lake.  Night frosts had
+painted the forests red.  The flacker of wild-fowl overhead, the skim
+of ice forming on the lake, the poignant sting of the north wind--all
+fore-warned winter's approach.  Jean de la Verendrye had not come up
+with the supplies from Michilimackinac.  The explorer did not tempt
+mutiny by going farther.  He ordered a halt and began building a fort
+that was to be the centre of operations between Montreal and the
+unfound Western Sea.  The fort was named St. Charles in honor of
+Beauharnois.  It was defended by four rows of thick palisades fifteen
+feet high.  In the middle of the enclosure stood the living quarters,
+log cabins with thatched roofs.
+
+[Illustration: A Group of Cree Indians.]
+
+By October the Indians had scattered to their hunting-grounds like
+leaves to the wind.  The ice thickened.  By November the islands were
+ice-locked and snow had drifted waist-high through the forests.  The
+_voyageurs_ could still fish through ice holes for food; but where was
+young Jean who was to bring up provisions from Michilimackinac?  The
+commander did not voice his fears; and his men were too deep in the
+wilds for desertion.  One afternoon, a shout sounded from the silent
+woods, and out from the white-edged evergreens stepped a figure on
+snowshoes--Jean de la Verendrye, leading his boatmen, with the
+provisions packed on their backs, from a point fifty miles away where
+the ice had caught the canoes.  If the supplies had not come, the
+explorer could neither have advanced nor retreated in spring.  It was a
+risk that De la Verendrye did not intend to have repeated.  Suspecting
+that his merchant partners were dissatisfied, he sent Jemmeraie down to
+Montreal in 1733 to report and urge the necessity for prompt forwarding
+of all supplies.  With Jemmeraie went the Jesuit Messaiger; but their
+combined explanations failed to satisfy the merchants of Montreal.  De
+la Verendrye had now been away three years.  True, he had constructed
+two fur posts and sent East two cargoes of furs.  His partners were
+looking for enormous wealth.  Disappointed and caring nothing for the
+Western Sea; perhaps, too, secretly accusing De la Verendrye of making
+profits privately, as many a gentleman of fortune did,--the merchants
+decided to advance provisions only in proportion to earnings.  What
+would become of the fifty men in the Northern wilderness the partners
+neither asked nor cared.
+
+Young Jean had meanwhile pushed on and built Fort Maurepas on Lake
+Winnipeg; but his father dared not leave Fort St. Charles without
+supplies.  De la Verendrye's position was now desperate.  He was
+hopelessly in debt to his men for wages.  That did not help discipline.
+His partners were not only withholding supplies, but charging up a high
+rate of interest on the first equipment.  To turn back meant ruin.  To
+go forward he was powerless.  Leaving Jemmeraie in command, and
+permitting his eager son to go ahead with a few picked men to Fort
+Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, De la Verendrye took a small canoe and
+descended with all swiftness to Quebec.  The winter of 1634-1635 was
+spent with the governor; and the partners were convinced that they must
+either go on with the venture or lose all.  They consented to continue
+supplying goods, but also charging all outlay against the explorer.
+
+Father Aulneau went back with De la Verendrye as chaplain.  The trip
+was made at terrible speed, in the hottest season, through stifling
+forest fires.  Behind, at slower pace, came the provisions.  De la
+Verendrye reached the Lake of the Woods in September.  Fearing the
+delay of the goods for trade, and dreading the danger of famine with so
+many men in one place, De la Verendrye despatched Jemmeraie to winter
+with part of the forces at Lake Winnipeg, where Jean and Pierre, the
+second son, had built Fort Maurepas.  The worst fears were realized.
+Ice had blocked the Northern rivers by the time the supplies had come
+to Lake Superior.  Fishing failed.  The hunt was poor.  During the
+winter of 1736 food became scantier at the little forts of St. Pierre,
+St. Charles, and Maurepas.  Rations were reduced from three times to
+once and twice a day.  By spring De la Verendrye was put to all the
+extremities of famine-stricken traders, his men subsisting on
+parchment, moccasin leather, roots, and their hunting dogs.
+
+He was compelled to wait at St. Charles for the delayed supplies.
+While he waited came blow upon blow: Jean and Pierre arrived from Fort
+Maurepas with news that Jemmeraie had died three weeks before on his
+way down to aid De la Verendrye.  Wrapped in a hunter's robe, his body
+was buried in the sand-bank of a little Northern stream, La Fourche des
+Roseaux.  Over the lonely grave the two brothers had erected a cross.
+Father and sons took stock of supplies.  They had not enough powder to
+last another month, and already the Indians were coming in with furs
+and food to be traded for ammunition.  If the Crees had known the
+weakness of the white men, short work might have been made of Fort St.
+Charles.  It never entered the minds of De la Verendrye and his sons to
+give up.  They decided to rush three canoes of twenty _voyageurs_ to
+Michilimackinac for food and powder.  Father Aulneau, the young priest,
+accompanied the boatmen to attend a religious retreat at
+Michilimackinac.  It had been a hard year for the youthful missionary.
+The ship that brought him from France had been plague-stricken.  The
+trip to Fort St. Charles had been arduous and swift, through stifling
+heat; and the year passed in the North was one of famine.
+
+Accompanied by the priest and led by Jean de la Verendrye, now in his
+twenty-third year, the _voyageurs_ embarked hurriedly on the 8th of
+June, 1736, five years to a day from the time that they left
+Montreal--and a fateful day it was--in the search for the Western Sea.
+The Crees had always been friendly; and when the boatmen landed on a
+sheltered island twenty miles from Fort St. Charles to camp for the
+night, no sentry was stationed.  The lake lay calm as glass in the hot
+June night, the camp-fire casting long lines across the water that
+could be seen for miles.  An early start was to be made in the morning
+and a furious pace to be kept all the way to Lake Superior, and the
+_voyageurs_ were presently sound asleep on the sand.  The keenest ears
+could scarcely have distinguished the soft lapping of muffled paddles;
+and no one heard the moccasined tread of ambushed Indians
+reconnoitring.  Seventeen Sioux stepped from their canoes, stole from
+cover to cover, and looked out on the unsuspecting sleepers.  Then the
+Indians as noiselessly slipped back to their canoes to carry word of
+the discovery to a band of marauders.
+
+[Illustration: "The soldiers marched out from Mount Royal."]
+
+Something had occurred at Fort St. Charles without M. de la Verendrye's
+knowledge.  Hilarious with their new possessions of firearms, and
+perhaps, also, mad with the brandy of which Father Aulneau had
+complained, a few mischievous Crees had fired from the fort on
+wandering Sioux of the prairie.
+
+"Who--fire--on--us?" demanded the outraged Sioux.
+
+"The French," laughed the Crees.
+
+The Sioux at once went back to a band of one hundred and thirty
+warriors.  "Tigers of the plains" the Sioux were called, and now the
+tigers' blood was up.  They set out to slay the first white man seen.
+By chance, he was one Bourassa, coasting by himself.  Taking him
+captive, they had tied him to burn him, when a slave squaw rushed out,
+crying: "What would you do?  This Frenchman is a friend of the Sioux!
+He saved my life!  If you desire to be avenged, go farther on!  You
+will find a camp of Frenchmen, among whom is the son of the white
+chief!"
+
+The _voyageur_ was at once unbound, and scouts scattered to find the
+white men.  Night had passed before the scouts had carried news of Jean
+de la Verendrye's men to the marauding warriors.  The ghostly gray of
+dawn saw the _voyageurs_ paddling swiftly through the morning mist from
+island to island of the Lake of the Woods.  Cleaving the mist behind,
+following solely by the double foam wreaths rippling from the canoe
+prows, came the silent boats of the Sioux.  When sunrise lifted the
+fog, the pursuers paused like stealthy cats.  At sunrise Jean de la
+Verendrye landed his crews for breakfast.  Camp-fires told the Indians
+where to follow.
+
+
+A few days later bands of Sautaux came to the camping ground of the
+French.  The heads of the white men lay on a beaver skin.  All had been
+scalped.  The missionary, Aulneau, was on his knees, as if in morning
+prayers.  An arrow projected from his head.  His left hand was on the
+earth, fallen forward, his right hand uplifted, invoking Divine aid.
+Young Verendrye lay face down, his back hacked to pieces, a spear sunk
+in his waist, the headless body mockingly decorated with porcupine
+quills.  So died one of the bravest of the young nobility in New France.
+
+The Sautaux erected a cairn of stones over the bodies of the dead.  All
+that was known of the massacre was vague Indian gossip.  The Sioux
+reported that they had not intended to murder the priest, but a
+crazy-brained fanatic had shot the fatal arrow and broken from
+restraint, weapon in hand.  Rain-storms had washed out all marks of the
+fray.
+
+In September the bodies of the victims were carried to Fort St.
+Charles, and interred in the chapel.  Eight hundred Crees besought M.
+de la Verendrye to let them avenge the murder; but the veteran of
+Malplaquet exhorted them not to war.  Meanwhile, Fort St. Charles
+awaited the coming of supplies from Lake Superior.
+
+
+IV
+
+1736-1740
+
+A week passed, and on the 17th of June the canoe loads of ammunition
+and supplies for which the murdered _voyageurs_ had been sent arrived
+at Fort St. Charles.  In June the Indian hunters came in with the
+winter's hunt; and on the 20th thirty Sautaux hurried to Fort St.
+Charles, to report that they had found the mangled bodies of the
+massacred Frenchmen on an island seven leagues from the fort.  Again La
+Verendrye had to choose whether to abandon his cherished dreams, or
+follow them at the risk of ruin and death.  As before, when his men had
+mutinied, he determined to advance.
+
+Jean, the eldest son, was dead.  Pierre and Francois were with their
+father.  Louis, the youngest, now seventeen years of age, had come up
+with the supplies.  Pierre at once went to Lake Winnipeg, to prepare
+Fort Maurepas for the reception of all the forces.  Winter set in.
+Snow lay twelve feet deep in the forests now known as the Minnesota
+Borderlands.  On February 8, 1737, in the face of a biting north wind,
+with the thermometer at forty degrees below zero, M. de la Verendrye
+left Fort St. Charles, Francois carrying the French flag, with ten
+soldiers, wearing snow-shoes, in line behind, and two or three hundred
+Crees swathed in furs bringing up a ragged rear.  The bright uniforms
+of the soldiers were patches of red among the snowy everglades.
+Bivouac was made on beds of pine boughs,--feet to the camp-fire, the
+night frost snapping like a whiplash, the stars flashing with a steely
+clearness known only in northern climes.  The march was at a swift
+pace, for three weeks by canoe is short enough time to traverse the
+Minnesota and Manitoba Borderlands northwest to Lake Winnipeg; and in
+seventeen days M. de la Verendrye was at Fort Maurepas.
+
+Fort Maurepas (in the region of the modern Alexander) lay on a tongue
+of sand extending into the lake a few miles beyond the entrance of Red
+River.  Tamarack and poplar fringe the shore; and in windy weather the
+lake is lashed into a roughness that resembles the flux of ocean tides.
+I remember once going on a steamer towards the site of Maurepas.  The
+ship drew lightest of draft.  While we were anchored the breeze fell,
+and the ship was stranded as if by ebb tide for twenty-four hours.  The
+action of the wind explained the Indian tales of an ocean tide, which
+had misled La Verendrye into expecting to find the Western Sea at this
+point.  He found a magnificent body of fresh water, but not the ocean.
+The fort was the usual pioneer fur post--a barracks of unbarked logs,
+chinked up with frozen clay and moss, roofed with branches and snow,
+occupying the centre of a courtyard, palisaded by slabs of pine logs.
+M. de la Verendrye was now in the true realm of the explorer--in
+territory where no other white man had trod.  With a shout his motley
+forces emerged from the snowy tamaracks, and with a shout from Pierre
+de la Verendrye and his tawny followers the explorer was welcomed
+through the gateway of little Fort Maurepas.
+
+[Illustration: Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca
+River.]
+
+Pierre de la Verendrye had heard of a region to the south much
+frequented by the Assiniboine Indians, who had conducted Radisson to
+the Sea of the North fifty years before--the Forks where the
+Assiniboine River joins the Red, and the city of Winnipeg stands
+to-day.  It was reported that game was plentiful here.  Two hundred
+tepees of Assiniboines were awaiting the explorer.  His forces were
+worn with their marching, but in a few weeks the glaze of ice above the
+fathomless drifts of snow would be too rotten for travel, and not until
+June would the riverways be clear for canoes.  But such a scant supply
+of goods had his partners sent up that poor De la Verendrye had nothing
+to trade with the waiting Assiniboines.  Sending his sons forward to
+reconnoitre the Forks of the Assiniboine,--the modern Winnipeg,--he set
+out for Montreal as soon as navigation opened, taking with him fourteen
+great canoes of precious furs.
+
+The fourteen canoe loads proved his salvation.  As long as there were
+furs and prospects of furs, his partners would back the enterprise of
+finding the Western Sea.  The winter of 1738 was spent as the guest of
+the governor at Chateau St. Louis.  The partners were satisfied, and
+plucked up hope of their venture.  They would advance provisions in
+proportion to earnings.  By September he was back at Fort Maurepas on
+Lake Winnipeg, pushing for the undiscovered bourne of the Western Sea.
+Leaving orders for trade with the chief clerk at Maurepas, De la
+Verendrye picked out his most intrepid men; and in September of 1738,
+for the first time in history, white men glided up the ochre-colored,
+muddy current of the Red for the Forks of the Assiniboine.  Ten Cree
+wigwams and two war chiefs awaited De la Verendrye on the low flats of
+what are now known as South Winnipeg.  Not the fabled Western Sea, but
+an illimitable ocean of rolling prairie--the long russet grass rising
+and falling to the wind like waves to the run of invisible
+feet--stretched out before the eager eyes of the explorer.  Northward
+lay the autumn-tinged brushwood of Red River.  South, shimmering in the
+purple mists of Indian summer, was Red River Valley.  Westward the sun
+hung like a red shield, close to the horizon, over vast reaches of
+prairie billowing to the sky-line in the tide of a boundless ocean.
+Such was the discovery of the Canadian Northwest.
+
+Doubtless the weary gaze of the tired _voyageurs_ turned longingly
+westward.  Where was the Western Sea?  Did it lie just beyond the
+horizon where skyline and prairie met, or did the trail of their quest
+run on--on--on--endlessly?  The Assiniboine flows into the Red, the Red
+into Lake Winnipeg, the Lake into Hudson Bay.  Plainly, Assiniboine
+Valley was not the way to the Western Sea.  But what lay just beyond
+this Assiniboine Valley?  An old Cree chief warned the boatmen that the
+Assiniboine River was very low and would wreck the canoes; but he also
+told vague yarns of "great waters beyond the mountains of the setting
+sun," where white men dwelt, and the waves came in a tide, and the
+waters were salt.  The Western Sea where the Spaniards dwelt had long
+been known.  It was a Western Sea to the north, that would connect
+Louisiana and Canada, that De la Verendrye sought.  The Indian fables,
+without doubt, referred to a sea beyond the Assiniboine River, and
+thither would De la Verendrye go at any cost.  Some sort of barracks or
+shelter was knocked up on the south side of the Assiniboine opposite
+the flats.  It was subsequently known as Fort Rouge, after the color of
+the adjacent river, and was the foundation of Winnipeg.  Leaving men to
+trade at Fort Rouge, De la Verendrye set out on September 26, 1738, for
+the height of land that must lie beyond the sources of the Assiniboine.
+De la Verendrye was now like a man hounded by his own Frankenstein.  A
+thousand leagues--every one marked by disaster and failure and sinking
+hopes--lay behind him.  A thousand leagues of wilderness lay before
+him.  He had only a handful of men.  The Assiniboine Indians were of
+dubious friendliness.  The white men were scarce of food.  In a few
+weeks they would be exposed to the terrible rigors of Northern winter.
+Yet they set their faces toward the west, types of the pioneers who
+have carved empire out of wilderness.
+
+[Illustration: The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains.]
+
+The Assiniboine was winding and low, with many sand bars.  On the
+wooded banks deer and buffalo grazed in such countless multitudes that
+the boatmen took them for great herds of cattle.  Flocks of wild geese
+darkened the sky overhead.  As the boats wound up the shallows of the
+river, ducks rose in myriad flocks.  Prairie wolves skulked away from
+the river bank, and the sand-hill cranes were so unused to human
+presence that they scarcely rose as the voyageurs poled past.  While
+the boatmen poled, the soldiers marched in military order across
+country, so avoiding the bends of the river.  Daily, Crees and
+Assiniboines of the plains joined the white men.  A week after leaving
+the Forks or Fort Rouge, De la Verendrye came to the Portage of the
+Prairie, leading north to Lake Manitoba and from the lake to Hudson
+Bay.  Clearly, northward was not the way to the Western Sea; but the
+Assiniboines told of a people to the southwest--the Mandans--who knew a
+people who lived on the Western Sea.  As soon as his baggage came up,
+De la Verendrye ordered the construction of a fort--called De la
+Reine--on the banks of the Assiniboine.  This was to be the forwarding
+post for the Western Sea.  To the Mandans living on the Missouri, who
+knew a people living on salt water, De la Verendrye now directed his
+course.
+
+[Illustration: Hungry Hall, 1870; near the site of the Verendrye Fort
+in Rainy River Region.]
+
+On the morning of October 18 drums beat to arms.  Additional men had
+come up from the other forts.  Fifty-two soldiers and _voyageurs_ now
+stood in line.  Arms were inspected.  To each man were given powder,
+balls, axe, and kettle.  Pierre and Francois de la Verendrye hoisted
+the French flag.  For the first time a bugle call sounded over the
+prairie.  At the word, out stepped the little band of white men,
+marking time for the Western Sea.  The course lay west-southwest, up
+the Souris River, through wooded ravines now stripped of foliage, past
+alkali sloughs ice-edged by frost, over rolling cliffs russet and bare,
+where gopher and badger and owl and roving buffalo were the only signs
+of life.  On the 21st of October two hundred Assiniboine warriors
+joined the marching white men.  In the sheltered ravines buffalo grazed
+by the hundreds of thousands, and the march was delayed by frequent
+buffalo hunts to gather pemmican--pounded marrow and fat of the
+buffalo--which was much esteemed by the Mandans.  Within a month so
+many Assiniboines had joined the French that the company numbered more
+than six hundred warriors, who were ample protection against the Sioux;
+and the Sioux were the deadly terror of all tribes of the plains.  But
+M.  de la Verendrye was expected to present ammunition to his
+Assiniboine friends.
+
+Four outrunners went speeding to the Missouri to notify the Mandans of
+the advancing warriors.  The _coureurs_ carried presents of pemmican.
+To prevent surprise, the Assiniboines marched under the sheltered
+slopes of the hills and observed military order.  In front rode the
+warriors, dressed in garnished buckskin and armed with spears and
+arrows.  Behind, on foot, came the old and the lame.  To the rear was
+another guard of warriors.  Lagging in ragged lines far back came a
+ragamuffin brigade, the women, children, and dogs--squaws astride
+cayuses lean as barrel hoops, children in moss bags on their mothers'
+backs, and horses and dogs alike harnessed with the _travaille_--two
+sticks tied into a triangle, with the shafts fastened to a cinch on
+horse or dog.  The joined end of the shafts dragged on the ground, and
+between them hung the baggage, surmounted by papoose, or pet owl, or
+the half-tamed pup of a prairie-wolf, or even a wild-eyed young squaw
+with hair flying to the wind.  At night camp was made in a circle
+formed of the hobbled horses.  Outside, the dogs scoured in pursuit of
+coyotes.  The women and children took refuge in the centre, and the
+warriors slept near their picketed horses.  By the middle of November
+the motley cavalcade had crossed the height of land between the
+Assiniboine River and the Missouri, and was heading for the Mandan
+villages.  Mandan _coureurs_ came out to welcome the visitors,
+pompously presenting De la Verendrye with corn in the ear and tobacco.
+At this stage, the explorer discovered that his bag of presents for his
+hosts had been stolen by the Assiniboines; but he presented the Mandans
+with what ammunition he could spare, and gave them plenty of pemmican
+which his hunters had cured.  The two tribes drove a brisk trade in
+furs, which the northern Indians offered, and painted plumes, which the
+Mandans displayed to the envy of Assiniboine warriors.
+
+On the 3d of December, De la Verendrye's sons stepped before the ragged
+host of six hundred savages with the French flag hoisted.  The explorer
+himself was lifted to the shoulders of the Mandan _coureurs_.  A gun
+was fired and the strange procession set out for the Mandan villages.
+In this fashion white men first took possession of the Upper Missouri.
+Some miles from the lodges a band of old chiefs met De la Verendrye and
+gravely handed him a grand calumet of pipestone ornamented with eagle
+feathers.  This typified peace.  De la Verendrye ordered his fifty
+French followers to draw up in line.  The sons placed the French flag
+four paces to the fore.  The Assiniboine warriors took possession in
+stately Indian silence to the right and left of the whites.  At a
+signal three thundering volleys of musketry were fired.  The Mandans
+fell back, prostrated with fear and wonder.  The command "forward" was
+given, and the Mandan village was entered in state at four in the
+afternoon of December 3, 1738.
+
+The village was in much the same condition as a hundred years later
+when visited by Prince Maximilian and by the artist Catlin.  It
+consisted of circular huts, with thatched roofs, on which perched the
+gaping women and children.  Around the village of huts ran a moat or
+ditch, which was guarded in time of war with the Sioux.  Flags flew
+from the centre poles of each hut; but the flags were the scalps of
+enemies slain.  In the centre of the village was a larger hut.  This
+was the "medicine lodge," or council hall, of the chiefs, used only for
+ceremonies of religion and war and treaties of peace.  Thither De la
+Verendrye was conducted.  Here the Mandan chiefs sat on buffalo robes
+in a circle round the fire, smoking the calumet, which was handed to
+the white man.  The explorer then told the Indians of his search for
+the Western Sea.  Of a Western Sea they could tell him nothing
+definite.  They knew a people far west who grew corn and tobacco and
+who lived on the shores of water that was bitter for drinking.  The
+people were white.  They dressed in armor and lived in houses of stone.
+Their country was full of mountains.  More of the Western Sea, De la
+Verendrye could not learn.
+
+Meanwhile, six hundred Assiniboine visitors were a tax on the
+hospitality of the Mandans, who at once spread a rumor of a Sioux raid.
+This gave speed to the Assiniboines' departure.  Among the Assiniboines
+who ran off in precipitate fright was De la Verendrye's interpreter.
+It was useless to wait longer.  The French were short of provisions,
+and the Missouri Indians could not be expected to support fifty white
+men.  Though it was the bitter cold of midwinter, De la Verendrye
+departed for Fort de la Reine.  Two Frenchmen were left to learn the
+Missouri dialects.  A French flag in a leaden box with the arms of
+France inscribed was presented to the Mandan chief; and De la Verendrye
+marched from the village on the 8th of December.  Scarcely had he left,
+when he fell terribly ill; but for the pathfinder of the wilderness
+there is neither halt nor retreat.  M. de la Verendrye's ragged army
+tramped wearily on, half blinded by snow glare and buffeted by prairie
+blizzards, huddling in snowdrifts from the wind at night and uncertain
+of their compass over the white wastes by day.  There is nothing so
+deadly silent and utterly destitute of life as the prairie in
+midwinter.  Moose and buffalo had sought the shelter of wooded ravines.
+Here a fox track ran over the snow.  There a coyote skulked from cover,
+to lope away the next instant for brushwood or hollow, and
+snow-buntings or whiskey-jacks might have followed the marchers for
+pickings of waste; but east, west, north, and south was nothing but the
+wide, white wastes of drifted snow.  On Christmas Eve of 1738 low
+curling smoke above the prairie told the wanderers that they were
+nearing the Indian camps of the Assiniboines; and by nightfall of
+February 10, 1739, they were under the shelter of Fort de la Reine.  "I
+have never been so wretched from illness and fatigue in all my life as
+on that journey," reported De la Verendrye.  As usual, provisions were
+scarce at the fort.  Fifty people had to be fed.  Buffalo and deer meat
+saved the French from starvation till spring.
+
+[Illustration: A Monarch of the Plains.]
+
+All that De la Verendrye had accomplished on this trip was to learn
+that salt water existed west-southwest.  Anxious to know more of the
+Northwest, he sent his sons to the banks of a great northern river.
+This was the Saskatchewan.  In their search of the Northwest, they
+constructed two more trading posts, Fort Dauphin near Lake Manitoba,
+and Bourbon on the Saskatchewan.  Winter quarters were built at the
+forks of the river, which afterwards became the site of Fort Poskoyac.
+This spring not a canoe load of food came up from Montreal.  Papers had
+been served for the seizure of all De la Verendrye's forts, goods,
+property, and chattels to meet the claims of his creditors.  Desperate,
+but not deterred from his quest, De la Verendrye set out to contest the
+lawsuits in Montreal.
+
+
+V
+
+1740-1750
+
+Which way to turn now for the Western Sea that eluded their quest like
+a will-o'-the-wisp was the question confronting Pierre, Francois, and
+Louis de la Verendrye during the explorer's absence in Montreal.  They
+had followed the great Saskatchewan westward to its forks.  No river
+was found in this region flowing in the direction of the Western Sea.
+They had been in the country of the Missouri; but neither did any river
+there flow to a Western Sea.  Yet the Mandans told of salt water far to
+the west.  Thither they would turn the baffling search.
+
+The two men left among the Mandans to learn the language had returned
+to the Assiniboine River with more news of tribes from "the setting
+sun" who dwelt on salt water.  Pierre de la Verendrye went down to the
+Missouri with the two interpreters; but the Mandans refused to supply
+guides that year, and the young Frenchman came back to winter on the
+Assiniboine.  Here he made every preparation for another attempt to
+find the Western Sea by way of the Missouri.  On April 29, 1742, the
+two brothers, Pierre and Francois, left the Assiniboine with the two
+interpreters.  Their course led along the trail that for two hundred
+years was to be a famous highway between the Missouri and Hudson Bay.
+Heading southwest, they followed the Souris River to the watershed of
+the Missouri, and in three weeks were once more the guests of the smoky
+Mandan lodges.  Round the inside walls of each circular hut ran berth
+beds of buffalo skin with trophies of the chase,--hide-shields and
+weapons of war, fastened to the posts that separated berth from berth.
+A common fire, with a family meat pot hanging above, occupied the
+centre of the lodge.  In one of these lodges the two brothers and their
+men were quartered.  The summer passed feasting with the Mandans and
+smoking the calumet of peace; but all was in vain.  The Missouri
+Indians were arrant cowards in the matter of war.  The terror of their
+existence was the Sioux.  The Mandans would not venture through Sioux
+territory to accompany the brothers in the search for the Western Sea.
+At last two guides were obtained, who promised to conduct the French to
+a neighboring tribe that might know of the Western Sea.
+
+[Illustration: Fur Traders' Boats towed down the Saskatchewan in the
+Summer of 1900.]
+
+The party set out on horseback, travelling swiftly southwest and along
+the valley of the Little Missouri toward the Black Hills.  Here their
+course turned sharply west toward the Powder River country, past the
+southern bounds of the Yellowstone.  For three weeks they saw no sign
+of human existence.  Deer and antelope bounded over the parched alkali
+uplands.  Prairie dogs perched on top of their earth mounds, to watch
+the lonely riders pass; and all night the far howl of grayish forms on
+the offing of the starlit prairie told of prowling coyotes.  On the
+11th of August the brothers camped on the Powder Hills.  Mounting to
+the crest of a cliff, they scanned far and wide for signs of the
+Indians whom the Mandans knew.  The valleys were desolate.  Kindling a
+signal-fire to attract any tribes that might be roaming, they built a
+hut and waited.  A month passed.  There was no answering signal.  One
+of the Mandan guides took himself off in fright.  On the fifth week a
+thin line of smoke rose against the distant sky.  The remaining Mandans
+went to reconnoitre and found a camp of Beaux Hommes, or Crows, who
+received the French well.  Obtaining fresh guides from the Crows and
+dismissing the Mandans, the brothers again headed westward.  The Crows
+guided them to the Horse Indians, who in turn took the French to their
+next western neighbors, the Bows.  The Bows were preparing to war on
+the Snakes, a mountain tribe to the west.  Tepees dotted the valley.
+Women were pounding the buffalo meat into pemmican for the raiders.
+The young braves spent the night with war-song and war-dance, to work
+themselves into a frenzy of bravado.  The Bows were to march west; so
+the French joined the warriors, gradually turning northwest toward what
+is now Helena.
+
+It was winter.  The hills were powdered with snow that obliterated all
+traces of the fleeing Snakes.  The way became more mountainous and
+dangerous.  Iced sloughs gave place to swift torrents and cataracts.
+On New Year's day, 1743, there rose through the gray haze to the fore
+the ragged sky-line of the Bighorn Mountains.  Women and children were
+now left in a sheltered valley, the warriors advancing unimpeded.
+Francois de la Verendrye remained at the camp to guard the baggage.
+Pierre went on with the raiders.  In two weeks they were at the foot of
+the main range of the northern Rockies.  Against the sky the snowy
+heights rose--an impassable barrier between the plains and the Western
+Sea.  What lay beyond--the Beyond that had been luring them on and on,
+from river to river and land to land, for more than ten years?  Surely
+on the other side of those lofty summits one might look down on the
+long-sought Western Sea.  Never suspecting that another thousand miles
+of wilderness and mountain fastness lay between him and his quest,
+young De la Verendrye wanted to cross the Great Divide.  Destiny
+decreed otherwise.  The raid of the Bows against the Snakes ended in a
+fiasco.  No Snakes were to be found at their usual winter hunt.  Had
+they decamped to massacre the Bow women and children left in the valley
+to the rear?  The Bows fled back to their wives in a panic; so De la
+Verendrye could not climb the mountains that barred the way to the sea.
+The retreat was made in the teeth of a howling mountain blizzard, and
+the warriors reached the rendezvous more dead than alive.  No Snake
+Indians were seen at all.  The Bows marched homeward along the valley
+of the Upper Missouri through the country of the Sioux, with whom they
+were allied.  On the banks of the river the brothers buried a leaden
+plate with the royal arms of France imprinted.  At the end of July,
+1743, they were once more back on the Assiniboine River.  For thirteen
+years they had followed a hopeless quest.  Instead of a Western Sea,
+they had found a sea of prairie, a sea of mountains, and two great
+rivers, the Saskatchewan and the Missouri.
+
+
+VI
+
+1743-1750
+
+But the explorer, who had done so much to extend French domain in the
+West, was a ruined man.  To the accusations of his creditors were added
+the jealous calumnies of fur traders eager to exploit the new country.
+The eldest son, with tireless energy, had gone up the Saskatchewan to
+Fort Poskoyac when he was recalled to take a position in the army at
+Montreal.  In 1746 De la Verendrye himself was summoned to Quebec and
+his command given to M. de Noyelles.  The game being played by jealous
+rivals was plain.  De la Verendrye was to be kept out of the West while
+tools of the Quebec traders spied out the fur trade of the Assiniboine
+and the Missouri.  Immediately on receiving freedom from military duty,
+young Chevalier de la Verendrye set out for Manitoba.  On the way he
+met his father's successor, M. de Noyelles, coming home crestfallen.
+The supplanter had failed to control the Indians.  In one year half the
+forts of the chain leading to the Western Sea had been destroyed.
+These Chevalier de la Verendrye restored as he passed westward.
+
+Governor Beauharnois had always refused to believe the charges of
+private peculation against M. de la Verendrye.  Governor de la
+Galissonniere was equally favorable to the explorer; and De la
+Verendrye was decorated with the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, and
+given permission to continue his explorations.  The winter of 1749 was
+passed preparing supplies for the posts of the West; but a life of
+hardship and disappointment had undermined the constitution of the
+dauntless pathfinder.  On the 6th of December, while busy with plans
+for his hazardous and thankless quest, he died suddenly at Montreal.
+
+Rival fur traders scrambled for the spoils of the Manitoba and Missouri
+territory like dogs for a bone.  De la Jonquiere had become governor.
+Allied with him was the infamous Bigot, the intendant, and those two
+saw in the Western fur trade an opportunity to enrich themselves.  The
+rights of De la Verendrye's sons to succeed their father were entirely
+disregarded.  Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was appointed commander of the
+Western Sea.  The very goods forwarded by De la Verendrye were
+confiscated.
+
+[Illustration: "Tepees dotted the valley."]
+
+But Saint-Pierre had enough trouble from his appointment.  His
+lieutenant, M. de Niverville, almost lost his life among hostiles on
+the way down the Saskatchewan after building Fort Lajonquiere at the
+foothills of the Rockies, where Calgary now stands.  Saint-Pierre had
+headquarters in Manitoba on the Assiniboine, and one afternoon in
+midwinter, when his men were out hunting, he saw his fort suddenly fill
+with armed Assiniboines bent on massacre.  They jostled him aside,
+broke into the armory, and helped themselves to weapons.  Saint-Pierre
+had only one recourse.  Seizing a firebrand, he tore the cover off a
+keg of powder and threatened to blow the Indians to perdition.  The
+marauders dashed from the fort, and Saint-Pierre shot the bolts of gate
+and sally-port.  When the white hunters returned, they quickly gathered
+their possessions together and abandoned Fort de la Reine.  Four days
+later the fort lay in ashes.  So ended the dream of enthusiasts to find
+a way overland to the Western Sea.
+
+
+[1] The authorities for La Verendrye's life are, of course, his own
+reports as found in the State Papers of the Canadian Archives, Pierre
+Margry's compilation of these reports, and the Rev. Father Jones'
+collection of the _Aulneau Letters_.
+
+[2] The _Pays d'en Haut_ or "Up-Country" was the vague name given by
+the fur traders to the region between the Missouri and the North Pole.
+
+[3] Throughout this volume the word "Sioux" is used as applying to the
+entire confederacy, and not to the Minnesota Sioux only.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+1769-1782
+
+SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE LEADS
+  SAMUEL HEARNE TO THE ARCTIC CIRCLE AND
+  ATHABASCA REGION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+1769-1782
+
+SAMUEL HEARNE
+
+The Adventures of Hearne in his Search for the Coppermine River and the
+Northwest Passage--Hilarious Life of Wassail led by Governor
+Norton--The Massacre of the Eskimo by Hearne's Indians North of the
+Arctic Circle--Discovery of the Athabasca Country--Hearne becomes
+Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but is captured by the
+French--Frightful Death of Norton and Suicide of Matonabbee
+
+
+For a hundred years after receiving its charter to exploit the furs of
+the North, the Hudson's Bay Company slumbered on the edge of a frozen
+sea.
+
+Its fur posts were scattered round the desolate shores of the Northern
+bay like beads on a string; but the languid Company never attempted to
+penetrate the unknown lands beyond the coast.  It was unnecessary.  The
+Indians came to the Company.  The company did not need to go to the
+Indians.  Just as surely as spring cleared the rivers of ice and set
+the unlocked torrents rushing to the sea, there floated down-stream
+Indian dugout and birch canoe, loaded with wealth of peltries for the
+fur posts of the English Company.  So the English sat snugly secure
+inside their stockades, lords of the wilderness, and drove a thriving
+trade with folded hands.  For a penny knife, they bought a beaver skin;
+and the skin sold in Europe for two or three shillings.  The trade of
+the old Company was not brisk; but it paid.
+
+[Illustration: An Eskimo Belle.  Note the apron of ermine and sable].
+
+It was the prod of keen French traders that stirred the slumbering
+giant.  In his search for the Western Sea, De la Verendrye had pushed
+west by way of the Great Lakes to the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains
+and the Saskatchewan.  Henceforth, not so many furs came down-stream to
+the English Company on the bay.  De la Verendrye had been followed by
+hosts of free-lances--_coureurs_ and _voyageurs_--who spread through
+the wilderness from the Missouri to the Athabasca, intercepting the
+fleets of furs that formerly went to Hudson Bay.  The English Company
+rubbed its eyes; and rivals at home began to ask what had been done in
+return for the charter.  France had never ceased seeking the mythical
+Western Sea that was supposed to lie just beyond the Mississippi; and
+when French buccaneers destroyed the English Company's forts on the
+bay, the English ambassador at Paris exacted such an enormous bill of
+damages that the Hudson Bay traders were enabled to build a stronger
+fortress up at Prince of Wales on the mouth of Churchill River than the
+French themselves possessed at Quebec on the St. Lawrence.  What--asked
+the rivals of the Company in London--had been done in return for such
+national protection?  France had discovered and explored a whole new
+world north of the Missouri.  What had the English done?  Where did the
+Western Sea of which Spain had possession in the South lie towards the
+North?  What lay between the Hudson Bay and that Western Sea?  Was
+there a Northwest passage by water through this region to Asia?  If
+not, was there an undiscovered world in the North, like Louisiana in
+the South?  There was talk of revoking the charter.  Then the Company
+awakened from its long sleep with a mighty stir.
+
+The annual boats that came out to Hudson Bay in the summer of 1769
+anchored on the offing, six miles from the gray walls of Fort Prince of
+Wales, and roared out a salute of cannon becoming the importance of
+ships that bore almost revolutionary commissions.  The fort cannon on
+the walls of Churchill River thundered their answer.  A pinnace came
+scudding over the waves from the ships.  A gig boat launched out from
+the fort to welcome the messengers.  Where the two met halfway, packets
+of letters were handed to Moses Norton, governor at Fort Prince of
+Wales, commanding him to despatch his most intrepid explorers for the
+discovery of unknown rivers, strange lands, rumored copper mines, and
+the mythical Northwest Passage that was supposed to lead directly to
+China.
+
+The fort lay on a spit of sand running out into the bay at the mouth of
+Churchill River.  It was three hundred yards long by three hundred
+yards wide, with four bastions, in three of which were stores and wells
+of water.  The fourth bastion contained the powder-magazine.  The walls
+were thirty feet wide at the bottom and twenty feet wide at the top, of
+hammer-dressed stone, mounted with forty great cannon.  A commodious
+stone house, furnished with all the luxuries of the chase, stood in the
+centre of the courtyard.  This was the residence of the governor.
+Offices, warehouses, barracks, and hunters' lodges were banked round
+the inner walls of the fort.  The garrison consisted of thirty-nine
+common soldiers and a few officers.  In addition, there hung about the
+fort the usual habitues of a Northern fur post,--young clerks from
+England, who had come out for a year's experience in the wilds;
+underpaid artisans, striving to mend their fortunes by illicit trade;
+hunters and _coureurs_ and _voyageurs_, living like Indians but with a
+strain of white blood that forever distinguished them from their
+comrades; stately Indian sachems, stalking about the fort with whiffs
+of contempt from their long calumets for all this white-man luxury; and
+a ragamuffin brigade,--squaws, youngsters, and beggars,--who subsisted
+by picking up food from the waste heap of the fort.
+
+The commission to despatch explorers to the inland country proved the
+sensation of a century at the fort.  Round the long mess-room table
+gathered officers and traders, intent on the birch-bark maps drawn by
+old Indian chiefs of an unknown interior, where a "Far-Off-Metal River"
+flowed down to the Northwest Passage.  Huge log fires blazed on the
+stone hearths at each end of the mess room.  Smoky lanterns and pine
+fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light
+from rafters that girded ceiling and walls.  On the floor of flagstones
+lay enormous skins of the chase--polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly.
+Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders.
+Draped across the walls were Company flags--an English ensign with the
+letters "H. B. C." painted in white on a red background, or in red on a
+white background.
+
+At the head of the table sat one of the most remarkable scoundrels
+known in the annals of the Company, Moses Norton, governor of Fort
+Prince of Wales, a full-blooded Indian, who had been sent to England
+for nine years to be educated and had returned to the fort to resume
+all the vices and none of the virtues of white man and red.
+Clean-skinned, copper-colored, lithe and wiry as a tiger cat, with the
+long, lank, oily black hair of his race, Norton bore himself with all
+the airs of a European princelet and dressed himself in the beaded
+buckskins of a savage.  Before him the Indians cringed as before one of
+their demon gods, and on the same principle.  Bad gods could do the
+Indians harm.  Good gods wouldn't.  Therefore, the Indians propitiated
+the bad gods; and of all Indian demons Norton was the worst.  The black
+arts of mediaeval poisoning were known to him, and he never scrupled to
+use them against an enemy.  The Indians thought him possessed of the
+power of the evil eye; but his power was that of arsenic or laudanum
+dropped in the food of an unsuspecting enemy.  Two of his wives, with
+all of whom he was inordinately jealous, had died of poison.  Against
+white men who might offend him he used more open means,--the triangle,
+the whipping post, the branding iron.  Needless to say that a man who
+wielded such power swelled the Company's profits and stood high in
+favor with the directors.  At his right hand lay an enormous bunch of
+keys.  These he carried with him by day and kept under his pillow by
+night.  They were the keys to the apartments of his many wives, for
+like all Indians Norton believed in a plurality of wives, and the life
+of no Indian was safe who refused to contribute a daughter to the
+harem.  The two master passions of the governor were jealousy and
+tyranny; and while he lived like a Turkish despot himself, he ruled his
+fort with a rod of iron and left the brand of his wrath on the person
+of soldier or officer who offered indignity to the Indian race.  It was
+a common thing for Norton to poison an Indian who refused to permit a
+daughter to join the collection of wives; then to flog the back off a
+soldier who casually spoke to one of the wives in the courtyard; and in
+the evening spend the entire supper hour preaching sermons on virtue to
+his men.  By a curious freak, Marie, his daughter, now a child of nine,
+inherited from her father the gentle qualities of the English life in
+which he had passed his youth.  She shunned the native women and was
+often to be seen hanging on her father's arm, as officers and governor
+smoked their pipes over the mess-room table.
+
+Near Norton sat another famous Indian, Matonabbee, the son of a slave
+woman at the fort, who had grown up to become a great ambassador to the
+native tribes for the English traders.  Measuring more than six feet,
+straight as a lance, supple as a wrestler, thin, wiry, alert, restless
+with the instinct of the wild creatures, Matonabbee was now in the
+prime of his manhood, chief of the Chipewyans at the fort, and master
+of life and death to all in his tribe.  It was Matonabbee whom the
+English traders sent up the Saskatchewan to invite the tribes of the
+Athabasca down to the bay.  The Athabascans listened to the message of
+peace with a treacherous smile.  At midnight assassins stole to his
+tent, overpowered his slave, and dragged the captive out.  Leaping to
+his feet, Matonabbee shouted defiance, hurled his assailants aside like
+so many straws, pursued the raiders to their tents, single-handed
+released his slave, and marched out unscathed.  That was the way
+Matonabbee had won the Athabascans for the Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+Officers of the garrison, bluff sea-captains, spinning yarns of iceberg
+and floe, soldiers and traders, made up the rest of the company.  Among
+the white men was one eager face,--that of Samuel Hearne, who was to
+explore the interior and now scanned the birch-bark drawings to learn
+the way to the "Far-off-Metal River."
+
+[Illustration: Samuel Hearne.]
+
+By November 6 all was in readiness for the departure of the explorer.
+Two Indian guides, who knew the way to the North, were assigned to
+Hearne; two European servants went with him to look after the
+provisions; and two Indian hunters joined the company.  In the gray
+mist of Northern dawn, with the stars still pricking through the frosty
+air, seven salutes of cannon awakened the echoes of the frozen sea.
+The gates of the fort flung open, creaking with the frost rust, and
+Hearne came out, followed by his little company, the dog bells of the
+long toboggan sleighs setting up a merry jingling as the huskies broke
+from a trot to a gallop over the snow-fields for the North.  Heading
+west-northwest, the band travelled swiftly with all the enthusiasm of
+untested courage.  North winds cut their faces like whip-lashes.  The
+first night out there was not enough snow to make a wind-break of the
+drifts; so the sleighs were piled on edge to windward, dogs and men
+lying heterogeneously in their shelter.  When morning came, one of the
+Indian guides had deserted.  The way became barer.  Frozen swamps
+across which the storm wind swept with hurricane force were succeeded
+by high, rocky barrens devoid of game, unsheltered, with barely enough
+stunted shrubbery for the whittling of chips that cooked the morning
+and night meals.  In a month the travellers had not accomplished ten
+miles a day.  Where deer were found the Indians halted to gorge
+themselves with feasts.  Where game was scarce they lay in camp,
+depending on the white hunters.  Within three weeks rations had
+dwindled to one partridge a day for the entire company.  The Indians
+seemed to think that Hearne's white servants had secret store of food
+on the sleighs.  The savages refused to hunt.  Then Hearne suspected
+some ulterior design.  It was to drive him back to the fort by famine.
+Henceforth, he noticed on the march that the Indians always preceded
+the whites and secured any game before his men could fire a shot.  One
+night toward the end of November the savages plundered the sleighs.
+Hearne awakened in amazement to see the company marching off, laden
+with guns, ammunition, and hatchets.  He called.  Their answer was
+laughter that set the woods ringing.  Hearne was now two hundred miles
+from the fort, without either ammunition or food.  There was nothing to
+do but turn back.  The weather was fair.  By snaring partridges, the
+white men obtained enough game to sustain them till they reached the
+fort on the 11th of December.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle.]
+
+The question now was whether to wait till spring or set out in the
+teeth of midwinter.  If Hearne left the fort in spring, he could not
+possibly reach the Arctic Circle till the following winter; and with
+the North buried under drifts of snow, he could not learn where lay the
+Northwest Passage.  If he left the fort in winter in order to reach the
+Arctic in summer, he must expose his guides to the risks of cold and
+starvation.  The Indians told of high, rocky barrens, across which no
+canoes could be carried.  They advised snow-shoe travel.  Obtaining
+three Chipewyans and two Crees as guides, and taking no white servants,
+Hearne once more set out, on February 23, 1770, for the "Far-Away-Metal
+River."  This time there was no cannonading.  The guns were buried
+under snow-drifts twenty feet deep, and the snow-shoes of the
+travellers glided over the fort walls to the echoing cheers of soldiers
+and governor standing on the ramparts.  The company travelled light,
+depending on chance game for food.  All wood that could be used for
+fire lay hidden deep under snow.  At wide intervals over the white
+wastes mushroom cones of snow told where a stunted tree projected the
+antlered branches of topmost bough through the depths of drift; but for
+the most part camp was made by digging through the shallowest snow with
+snow-shoes to the bottom of moss, which served the double purpose of
+fuel for the night kettle and bed for travellers.  In the hollow a
+wigwam was erected, with the door to the south, away from the north
+wind.  Snared rabbits and partridges supplied the food.  The way lay as
+before--west-northwest--along a chain of frozen lakes and rivers
+connecting Hudson Bay with the Arctic Ocean.  By April the marchers
+were on the margin of a desolate wilderness--the Indian region of
+"Little Sticks,"--known to white men as the Barren Lands, where dwarf
+trees project above the billowing wastes of snow like dismantled masts
+on the far offing of a lonely sea.  Game became scarcer.  Neither the
+round footprint of the hare nor the frost tracery of the northern
+grouse marked the snowy reaches of unbroken white.  Caribou had
+retreated to the sheltered woods of the interior; and a cleverer hunter
+than man had scoured the wide wastes of game.  Only the wolf pack
+roamed the Barren Lands.  It was unsafe to go on without food.  Hearne
+kept in camp till the coming of the goose month--April--when birds of
+passage wended their way north.  For three days rations consisted of
+snow water and pipes of tobacco.  The Indians endured the privations
+with stoical indifference, daily marching out on a bootless quest for
+game.  On the third night Hearne was alone in his tent.  Twilight
+deepened to night, night to morning.  Still no hunters returned.  Had
+he been deserted?  Not a sound broke the waste silence but the baying
+of the wolf pack.  Weak from hunger, Hearne fell asleep.  Before
+daylight he was awakened by a shout; and his Indians shambled over the
+drifts laden with haunches of half a dozen deer.  That relieved want
+till the coming of the geese.  In May Hearne struck across the Barren
+Lands.  By June the rotting snow clogged the snow-shoes.  Dog trains
+drew heavy, and food was again scarce.  For a week the travellers found
+nothing to eat but cranberries.  Half the company was ill from hunger
+when a mangy old musk-ox, shedding his fur and lean as barrel hoops,
+came scrambling over the rocks, sure of foot as a mountain goat.  A
+single shot brought him down.  In spite of the musky odor of which the
+coarse flesh reeked, every morsel of the ox was instantly devoured.
+Sometimes during their long fasts they would encounter a solitary
+Indian wandering over the rocky barren.  If he had arms, gun, or arrow,
+and carried skins of the chase, he was welcomed to camp, no matter how
+scant the fare.  Otherwise he was shunned as an outcast, never to be
+touched or addressed by a human being; for only one thing could have
+fed an Indian on the Barren Lands who could show no trophies of the
+chase, and that was the flesh of some human creature weaker than
+himself.  The outcast was a cannibal, condemned by an unwritten law to
+wander alone through the wastes.
+
+Snow had barely cleared from the Barren Lands when Hearne witnessed the
+great traverse of the caribou herds, marching in countless multitudes
+with a clicking of horns and hoofs from west to east for the summer.
+Indians from all parts of the North had placed themselves at rivers
+across the line of march to spear the caribou as they swam; and Hearne
+was joined by a company of six hundred savages.  Summer had dried the
+moss.  That gave abundance of fuel.  Caribou were plentiful.  That
+supplied the hunters with pemmican.  Hearne decided to pass the
+following winter with the Indians; but he was one white man among
+hundreds of savages.  Nightly his ammunition was plundered.  One of his
+survey instruments was broken in a wind storm.  Others were stolen.  It
+was useless to go on without instruments to take observations of the
+Arctic Circle; so for a second time Hearne was compelled to turn back
+to Fort Prince of Wales.  Terrible storms impeded the return march.
+His dog was frozen in the traces.  Tent poles were used for fire-wood;
+and the northern lights served as the only compass.  On midday of
+November 25, 1770, after eight months' absence, in which he had not
+found the "Far-Off-Metal River," Hearne reached shelter inside the fort
+walls.
+
+Beating through the gales of sleet and snow on the homeward march,
+Hearne had careened into a majestic figure half shrouded by the storm.
+The explorer halted before a fur-muffled form, six feet in its
+moccasins, erect as a mast pole, haughty as a king; and the gauntleted
+hand of the Indian chief went up to his forehead in sign of peace.  It
+was Matonabbee, the ambassador of the Hudson's Bay Company to the
+Athabascans, now returning to Fort Prince of Wales, followed by a long
+line of slave women driving their dog sleighs.  The two travellers
+hailed each other through the storm like ships at sea.  That night they
+camped together on the lee side of the dog sleighs, piled high as a
+wind-break; and Matonabbee, the famous courser of the Northern wastes,
+gave Hearne wise advice.  Women should be taken on a long journey, the
+Indian chief said; for travel must be swift through the deadly cold of
+the barrens.  Men must travel light of hand, trusting to chance game
+for food.  Women were needed to snare rabbits, catch partridges, bring
+in game shot by the braves, and attend to the camping.  And then in a
+burst of enthusiasm, perhaps warmed by Hearne's fine tobacco,
+Matonabbee, who had found the way to the Athabasca, offered to conduct
+the white man to the "Far-Off-Metal River" of the Arctic Circle.  The
+chief was the greatest pathfinder of the Northern tribes.  His offer
+was the chance of a lifetime.  Hearne could hardly restrain his
+eagerness till he reached the fort.  Leaving Matonabbee to follow with
+the slave women, the explorer hurried to Fort Prince of Wales, laid the
+plan before Governor Norton, and in less than two weeks from the day of
+his return was ready to depart for the unknown river that was to lead
+to the Northwest Passage.
+
+The weather was dazzlingly clear, with that burnished brightness of
+polished steel known only where unbroken sunlight meets unbroken snow
+glare.  On the 7th of December, 1770, Hearne left the fort, led by
+Matonabbee and followed by the slave Indians with the dog sleighs.  One
+of Matonabbee's wives lay ill; but that did not hinder the iron
+pathfinder.  The woman was wrapped in robes and drawn on a dog sleigh.
+There was neither pause nor hesitation.  If the woman recovered, good.
+If she died, they would bury her under a cairn of stones as they
+travelled.  Matonabbee struck directly west-northwest for some _caches_
+of provisions which he had left hidden on the trail.  The place was
+found; but the _caches_ had been rifled clean of food.  That did not
+stop Matonabbee.  Nor did he show the slightest symptoms of anger.  He
+simply hastened their pace the more for their hunger, recognizing the
+unwritten law of the wilderness--that starving hunters who had rifled
+the _cache_ had a right to food wherever they found it.  Day after day,
+stoical as men of bronze, the marchers reeled off the long white miles
+over the snowy wastes, pausing only for night sleep with evening and
+morning meals.  Here nibbled twigs were found; there the stamping
+ground of a deer shelter; elsewhere the small, cleft foot-mark like the
+ace of hearts.  But the signs were all old.  No deer were seen.  Even
+the black marble eye that betrays the white hare on the snow, and the
+fluffy bird track of the feather-footed northern grouse, grew rarer;
+and the slave women came in every morning empty-handed from untouched
+snares.  In spite of hunger and cold, Matonabbee remained good-natured,
+imperturbable, hard as a man of bronze, coursing with the winged speed
+of snow-shoes from morning till night without pause, going to a bed of
+rock moss on a meal of snow water and rising eager as an arrow to leave
+the bow-string for the next day's march.  For three days before
+Christmas the entire company had no food but snow.  Christmas was
+celebrated by starvation.  Hearne could not indulge in the despair of
+the civilized man's self-pity when his faithful guides went on without
+complaint.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun.--C. W.
+Mathers.]
+
+By January the company had entered the Barren Lands.  The Barren Lands
+were bare but for an occasional oasis of trees like an island of refuge
+in a shelterless sea.  In the clumps of dwarf shrubs, the Indians found
+signs that meant relief from famine--tufts of hair rubbed off on tree
+trunks, fallen antlers, and countless heart-shaped tracks barely
+puncturing the snow but for the sharp outer edge.  The caribou were on
+their yearly traverse east to west for the shelter of the inland woods.
+The Indians at once pitched camp.  Scouts went scouring to find which
+way the caribou herds were coming.  Pounds of snares were constructed
+of shrubs and saplings stuck up in palisades with scarecrows on the
+pickets round a V-shaped enclosure.  The best hunters took their
+station at the angle of the V, armed with loaded muskets and long,
+lank, and iron-pointed arrows.  Women and children lined the palisades
+to scare back high jumpers or strays of the caribou herd.  Then scouts
+and dogs beat up the rear of the fleeing herd, driving the caribou
+straight for the pound.  By a curious provision of nature, the male
+caribou sheds its antlers just as he leaves the Barren Lands for the
+wooded interior, where the horns would impede flight through brush, and
+he only leaves the woods for the bare open when the horns are grown
+enough to fight the annual battle to protect the herd from the wolf
+pack ravenous with spring hunger.  For one caribou caught in the pound
+by Hearne's Indians, a hundred of the herd escaped; for the caribou
+crossed the Barrens in tens of thousands, and Matonabbee's braves
+obtained enough venison for the trip to the "Far-Off-Metal River."
+
+The farther north they travelled the scanter became the growth of pine
+and poplar and willow.  Snow still lay heavy in April; but Matonabbee
+ordered a halt while there was still large enough wood to construct
+dugouts to carry provisions down the river.  The boats were built large
+and heavy in front, light behind.  This was to resist the ice jam of
+Northern currents.  The caribou hunt had brought other Indians to the
+Barren Lands.  Matonabbee was joined by two hundred warriors.  Though
+the tribes puffed the calumet of peace together, they drew their war
+hatchets when they saw the smoke of an alien tribe's fire rise against
+the northern sky.  A suspicion that he hardly dared to acknowledge
+flashed through Hearne's mind.  Eleven thousand beaver pelts were
+yearly brought down to the fort from the unknown river.  How did the
+Chipewyans obtain these pelts from the Eskimo?  What was the real
+reason of the Indian eagerness to conduct the white man to the
+"Far-Off-Metal River"?  The white man was not taken into the confidence
+of the Indian council; but he could not fail to draw his own
+conclusions.
+
+Scouts were sent cautiously forward to trail the path of the aliens who
+had lighted the far moss fire.  Women and children were ordered to head
+about for a rendezvous southwest on Lake Athabasca.  Carrying only the
+lightest supplies, the braves set out swiftly for the North on June 1.
+Mist and rain hung so heavily over the desolate moors that the
+travellers could not see twenty feet ahead.  In places the rocks were
+glazed with ice and scored with runnels of water.  Half the warriors
+here lost heart and turned back.  The others led by Hearne and
+Matonabbee crossed the iced precipices on hands and knees, with gun
+stocks strapped to backs or held in teeth.  On the 21st of June the sun
+did not set.  Hearne had crossed the Arctic Circle.  The sun hung on
+the southern horizon all night long.  Henceforth the travellers marched
+without tents.  During rain or snow storm, they took refuge under rocks
+or in caves.  Provisions turned mouldy with wet.  The moss was too
+soaked for fire.  Snow fell so heavily in drifting storms that Hearne
+often awakened in the morning to find himself almost immured in the
+cave where they had sought shelter.  Ice lay solid on the lakes in
+July.  Once, clambering up steep, bare heights, the travellers met a
+herd of a hundred musk-oxen scrambling over the rocks with the agility
+of squirrels, the spreading, agile hoof giving grip that lifted the
+hulking forms over all obstacles.  Down the bleak, bare heights there
+poured cataract and mountain torrent, plainly leading to some near
+river bed; but the thick gray fog lay on the land like a blanket.  At
+last a thunder-storm cleared the air; and Hearne saw bleak moors
+sloping north, bare of all growth but the trunks of burnt trees, with
+barren heights of rock and vast, desolate swamps, where the wild-fowl
+flocked in myriads.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago.]
+
+All count of day and night was now lost, for the sun did not set.
+Sometime between midnight and morning of July 12, 1771, with the sun as
+bright as noon, the lakes converged to a single river-bed a hundred
+yards wide, narrowing to a waterfall that roared over the rocks in
+three cataracts.  This, then, was the "Far-Off-Metal River."  Plainly,
+it was a disappointing discovery, this Coppermine River.  It did not
+lead to China.  It did not point the way to a Northwest Passage.  In
+his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North
+America had learned--that the Great Northwest was something more than a
+bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its
+own destiny.[1]
+
+But Hearne had no time to brood over disappointment.  The conduct of
+his rascally companions could no longer be misunderstood.  Hunters came
+in with game; but when the hungry slaves would have lighted a moss fire
+to cook the meat, the forbidding hand of a chief went up.  No fires
+were to be lighted.  The Indians advanced with whispers, dodging from
+stone to stone like raiders in ambush.  Spies went forward on tiptoe.
+Then far down-stream below the cataracts Hearne descried the domed
+tent-tops of an Eskimo band sound asleep; for it was midnight, though
+the sun was at high noon.  When Hearne looked back to his companions,
+he found himself deserted.  The Indians were already wading the river
+for the west bank, where the Eskimo had camped.  Hearne overtook his
+guides stripping themselves of everything that might impede flight or
+give hand-hold to an enemy, and daubing their skin with war-paint.
+Hearne begged Matonabbee to restrain the murderous warriors.  The great
+chief smiled with silent contempt.  He was too true a disciple of a
+doctrine which Indians' practised hundreds of years before white men
+had avowed it--the survival of the fit, the extermination of the weak,
+for any qualms of pity towards a victim whose death would contribute
+profit.  Wearing only moccasins and bucklers of hardened hide, armed
+with muskets, lances, and tomahawks, the Indians jostled Hearne out of
+their way, stole forward from stone to stone to within a gun length of
+the Eskimo, then with a wild war shout flung themselves on the
+unsuspecting sleepers.
+
+The Eskimo were taken unprepared.  They staggered from their tents,
+still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which
+they had never before heard.  The poor creatures fled in frantic
+terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt.  A young girl fell
+coiling at Hearne's feet like a wounded snake.  A well-aimed lance had
+pinioned the living form to earth.  She caught Hearne round the knees,
+imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back
+with jeers.  Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put
+their victim out of pain.  The rocks rang with the mockery of the
+torturers.  She was speared to death before Hearne's eyes.  On that
+scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer bear to
+look.  He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a
+nightmare.  Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide
+boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing
+down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless
+as stone was an old, old woman--probably a witch of the tribe--red-eyed
+as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of
+all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls.  There was a shout
+from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate;
+and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as
+insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack.  Odd commentary in our
+modern philosophies--this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned,
+weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by
+bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to
+jostle the Indian from the face of the New World.  Something more than
+a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a
+race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak,
+vacillating Hearne, weeping like a woman.
+
+Horror of the massacre robbed Hearne of all an explorer's exultation.
+A day afterward, on July 17, he stood on the shores of the Arctic
+Ocean,--the first white man to reach it overland in America.  Ice
+extended from the mouth of the river as far as eye could see.  Not a
+sign of land broke the endless reaches of cold steel, where the snow
+lay, and icy green, where pools of the ocean cast their reflection on
+the sky of the far horizon.  At one in the morning, with the sun
+hanging above the river to the south, Hearne formally took possession
+of the Arctic regions for the Hudson's Bay Company.  The same Company
+rules those regions to-day.  Not an eye had been closed for three days
+and nights.  Throwing themselves down on the wet shore, the entire band
+now slept for six hours.  The hunters awakened to find a musk-ox nosing
+over the mossed rocks.  A shot sent it tumbling over the cliffs.
+Whether it was that the moss was too wet for fuel to cook the meat, or
+the massacre had brutalized the men into beasts of prey, the Indians
+fell on the carcass and devoured it raw.[2]
+
+[Illustration: Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's Drawing,
+1733-47.]
+
+The retreat from the Arctic was made with all swiftness, keeping close
+to the Coppermine River.  For thirty miles from the sea not a tree was
+to be seen.  The river was sinuous and narrow, hemmed in by walls of
+solid rock, down which streamed cascades and mountain torrents.  On
+both sides of the high bank extended endless reaches of swamps and
+barrens.  Twenty miles from the sea Hearne found the copper mines from
+which the Indians made their weapons.  His guides were to join their
+families in the Athabasca country of the southwest, and thither
+Matonabbee now led the way at such a terrible pace that moccasins were
+worn to shreds and toe-nails torn from the feet of the marchers; and
+woe to the man who fell behind, for the wolf pack prowled on the rear.
+
+When the smoke of moss fires told of the wives' camp, the Indians
+halted to take the sweat bath of purification for the cleansing of all
+blood guilt from the massacre.  Heated stones were thrown into a small
+pool.  In this each Indian bathed himself, invoking his deity for
+freedom from all punishment for the deaths of the slain.[3]  By August
+the Indians had joined their wives.  By October they were on Lake
+Athabasca, which had already frozen.  Here one of the wives, in the
+last stages of consumption, could go no farther.  For a band short of
+food to halt on the march meant death to all.  The Northern wilderness
+has its grim unwritten law, inexorable and merciless as death.  For
+those who fall by the way there is no pity.  A whole tribe may not be
+exposed to death for the sake of one person.  Civilized nations follow
+the same principle in their quarantine.  Giving the squaw food and a
+tent, the Indians left her to meet her last enemy, whether death came
+by starvation or cold or the wolf pack.  Again and again the abandoned
+squaw came up with the marchers, weeping and begging their pity, only
+to fall from weakness.  But the wilderness has no pity; and so they
+left her.
+
+Christmas of 1771 was passed on Athabasca Lake, the northern lights
+rustling overhead with the crackling of a flag.  There was food in
+plenty; for the Athabasca was rich in buffalo meadows and beaver dams
+and moose yards.  On the lake shore Hearne found a little cabin, in
+which dwelt a solitary woman of the Dog Rib tribe who for eight months
+had not seen a soul.  Her band had been massacred.  She alone escaped
+and had lived here in hiding for almost a year.  In spring the Indians
+of the lake carried their furs to the forts of Hudson Bay.  With the
+Athabascans went Hearne, reaching Fort Prince of Wales on June 30,
+1772, after eighteen months' absence.
+
+He had discovered Coppermine River, the Arctic Ocean, and the Athabasca
+country,--a region in all as large as half European Russia.
+
+For his achievements Hearne received prompt promotion.  Within a year
+of his return to the fort, Governor Norton, the Indian bully, fell
+deadly ill.  In the agony of death throes, he called for his wives.
+The great keys to the apartments of the women were taken from his
+pillow, and the wives were brought in.  Norton lay convulsed with pain.
+One of the younger women began to sob.  An officer of the garrison took
+her hand to comfort her grief.  Norton's rolling eyes caught sight of
+the innocent conference between the officer and the young wife.  With a
+roar the dying bully hurled himself up in bed:--
+
+"I'll burn you alive!  I'll burn you alive," he shrieked.  With oaths
+on his lips he fell back dead.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Prince of Wales (Churchill), from Hearne's Account,
+1799 Edition.]
+
+Samuel Hearne became governor of the fort.  For ten years nothing
+disturbed the calm of his rule.  Marie, Norton's daughter, still lived
+in the shelter of the fort; the wives found consolation in other
+husbands; and Matonabbee continued the ambassador of the company to
+strange tribes.  One afternoon of August, 1782, the sleepy calm of the
+fort was upset by the sentry dashing in breathlessly with news that
+three great vessels of war with full-blown sails and carrying many guns
+were ploughing straight for Prince of Wales.  At sundown the ships
+swung at anchor six miles from the fort.  From their masts fluttered a
+foreign flag--the French ensign.  Gig boat and pinnace began sounding
+the harbor.  Hearne had less than forty men to defend the fort.  In the
+morning four hundred French troopers lined up on Churchill River, and
+the admiral, La Perouse, sent a messenger with demand of surrender.
+Hearne did not feel justified in exposing his men to the attack of
+three warships carrying from seventy to a hundred guns apiece, and to
+assault by land of four hundred troopers.  He surrendered without a
+blow.
+
+[Illustration: Beaver Coin of Hudson's Bay Company, melted from Old Tea
+Chests, one Coin representing one Beaver.]
+
+The furs were quickly transferred to the French ships, and the soldiers
+were turned loose to loot the fort.  The Indians fled, among them Moses
+Norton's gentle daughter, now in her twenty-second year.  She could not
+revert to the loathsome habits of savage life; she dared not go to the
+fort filled with lawless foreign soldiers; and she perished of
+starvation outside the walls.  Matonabbee had been absent when the
+French came.  He returned to find the fort where he had spent his life
+in ruins.  The English whom he thought invincible were defeated and
+prisoners of war.  Hearne, whom the dauntless old chief had led through
+untold perils, was a captive.  Matonabbee's proud spirit was broken.
+The grief was greater than he could bear.  All that living stood for
+had been lost.  Drawing off from observation, Matonabbee blew his
+brains out.
+
+
+[1] I have purposely avoided bringing up the dispute as to a mistake of
+some few degrees made by Hearne in his calculations--the point really
+being finical.
+
+[2] I am sorry to say that in pioneer border warfares I have heard of
+white men acting in a precisely similar beastly manner after some
+brutal conflict.  To be frank, I know of one case in the early days of
+Minnesota fur trade, where the irate fur trader killed and devoured his
+weak companion, not from famine, but sheer frenzy of brutalized
+passion.  Such naked light does wilderness life shed over our
+drawing-room philosophies of the triumphantly strong being the highest
+type of manhood.
+
+[3] Again the wilderness plunges us back to the primordial: if man be
+but the supreme beast of prey, whence this consciousness of blood guilt
+in these unschooled children of the wilds?
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+1780-1793
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES--HOW MACKENZIE
+  CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES AND LEWIS
+  AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM
+  MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+1780-1793
+
+FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES
+
+How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed
+across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the question of a
+Northwest Passage
+
+
+There is an old saying that if a man has the right mettle in him, you
+may stick him a thousand leagues in the wilderness on a barren rock and
+he will plant pennies and grow dollar bills.  In other words, no matter
+where or how, success will succeed.  No class illustrates this better
+than a type that has almost passed away--the old fur traders who were
+lords of the wilderness.  Cut off from all comfort, from all
+encouragement, from all restraint, what set of men ever had fewer
+incentives to go up, more temptations to go down?  Yet from the fur
+traders sprang the pioneer heroes of America.  When young Donald Smith
+came out--a raw lad--to America, he was packed off to eighteen years'
+exile on the desert coast of Labrador.  Donald Smith came out of the
+wilderness to become the Lord Strathcona of to-day.  Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts.  A clerk in a
+counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit
+setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for
+furs.  Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper
+Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he
+fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions
+is murdered, a second lamed, a third wounded.  In all this Alexander
+Mackenzie was successful while still in the prime of his manhood,--not
+more than thirty years of age; and the reward of his success was to be
+exiled to the sub-arctics of the Athabasca, six weeks' travel from
+another fur post,--not a likely field to play the hero.  Yet Mackenzie
+emerged from the polar wilderness bearing a name that ranks with
+Columbus and Carrier and La Salle.
+
+[Illustration: Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer.]
+
+Far north of the Missouri beyond the borderlands flows the
+Saskatchewan.  As far north again, beyond the Saskatchewan, flows
+another great river, the Athabasca, into Athabasca Lake, on whose blue
+shores to the north lies a little white-washed fort of some twenty log
+houses, large barn-like stores, a Catholic chapel, an Episcopal
+mission, and a biggish residence of pretence for the chief trader.
+This is Fort Chipewyan.  At certain seasons Indian tepees dot the
+surrounding plains; and bronze-faced savages, clad in the ill-fitting
+garments of white people, shamble about the stores, or sit haunched
+round the shady sides of the log houses, smoking long-stemmed pipes.
+These are the Chipewyans come in from their hunting-grounds; but for
+the most part the fort seems chiefly populated by regiments of husky
+dogs, shaggy-coated, with the sharp nose of the fox, which spend the
+long winters in harness coasting the white wilderness, and pass the
+summers basking lazily all day long except when the bell rings for fish
+time, when half a hundred huskies scramble wildly for the first meat
+thrown.
+
+A century ago Chipewyan was much the same as to-day, except that it lay
+on the south side of the lake.  Mails came only once in two years
+instead of monthly, and rival traders were engaged in the merry game of
+slitting each other's throats.  All together, it wasn't exactly the
+place for ambition to dream; but ambition was there in the person of
+Alexander Mackenzie, the young fur trader, dreaming what he hardly
+dared hope.  Business men fight shy of dreamers; so Mackenzie told his
+dreams to no one but his cousin Roderick, whom he pledged to secrecy.
+For fifty years the British government had offered a reward of 20,000
+pounds to any one who should discover a Northwest Passage between the
+Atlantic and the Pacific.  The hope of such a passageway had led many
+navigators on bootless voyages; and here was Mackenzie with the same
+bee in his bonnet.  To the north of Chipewyan he saw a mighty river,
+more than a mile wide in places, walled in by great ramparts, and
+flowing to unknown seas.  To the west he saw another river rolling
+through the far mountains.  Where did this river come from, and where
+did both rivers go?  Mackenzie was not the man to leave vital questions
+unanswered.  He determined to find out; but difficulties lay in the
+way.  He couldn't leave the Athabascan posts.  That was overcome by
+getting his cousin Roderick to take charge.  The Northwest Fur Company,
+which had succeeded the French fur traders of Quebec and Montreal when
+Canada passed from the hands of the French to the English, wouldn't
+assume any cost or risk for exploring unknown seas.  This was more
+niggardly than the Hudson's Bay Company, which had paid all cost of
+outlay for its explorers; but Mackenzie assumed risk and cost himself.
+Then the Indians hesitated to act as guides; so Mackenzie hired guides
+when he could, seized them by compulsion when he couldn't hire them,
+and went ahead without guides when they escaped.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for
+the Value of Three Beaver Skins.]
+
+May--the frog moon--and June--the bird's egg moon--were the festive
+seasons at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca.  Indian hunters came
+tramping in from the Barren Lands with toboggan loads of pelts drawn by
+half-wild husky dogs.  Woody Crees and Slaves and Chipewyans paddled
+across the lake in canoes laden to the gunwales with furs.  A world of
+white skin tepees sprang up like mushrooms round the fur post.  By June
+the traders had collected the furs, sorted and shipped them in
+flotillas of keel boat, barge, and canoe, east to Lake Superior and
+Montreal.  On the evening of June 2, 1789, Alexander Mackenzie, chief
+trader, had finished the year's trade and sent the furs to the Eastern
+warehouses of the Northwest Company, on Lake Superior, at Fort William,
+not far from where Radisson had first explored, and La Verendrye
+followed.  Indians lingered round the fort of the Northern lake engaged
+in mad _boissons_, or drinking matches, that used up a winter's
+earnings in the spree of a single week.  Along the shore lay upturned
+canoes, keels red against the blue of the lake, and everywhere in the
+dark burned the red fires of the boatmen melting resin to gum the seams
+of the canoes; for the canoes were to be launched on a long voyage the
+next day.  Mackenzie was going to float down with the current of the
+Athabasca or Grand River, and find out where that great river emptied
+in the North.
+
+The crew must have spent the night in a last wild spree; for it was
+nine in the morning before all hands were ready to embark.  In
+Mackenzie's large birch canoe went four Canadian _voyageurs_, their
+Indian wives, and a German.  In other canoes were the Indian hunters
+and interpreters, led by "English Chief," who had often been to Hudson
+Bay.  Few provisions were taken.  The men were to hunt, the women to
+cook and keep the _voyageurs_ supplied with moccasins, which wore out
+at the rate of one pair a day for each man.  Traders bound for Slave
+Lake followed behind.  Only fifty miles were made the first day.
+Henceforth Mackenzie embarked his men at three and four in the morning.
+
+[Illustration:  Quill and Bead Work on Buckskin, Mackenzie River
+Indians.]
+
+The mouth of Peace River was passed a mile broad as it pours down from
+the west, and the boatmen _portaged_ six rapids the third day, one of
+the canoes, steered by a squaw more intent on her sewing than the
+paddles, going over the falls with a smash that shivered the bark to
+kindling-wood.  The woman escaped, as the current caught the canoe, by
+leaping into the water and swimming ashore with the aid of a line.  Ice
+four feet thick clung to the walls of the rampart shores, and this
+increased the danger of landing for a _portage_, the Indians whining
+out their complaints in exactly the tone of the wailing north wind that
+had cradled their lives--"Eduiy, eduiy!--It is hard, white man, it is
+hard!"  And harder the way became.  For nine nights fog lay so heavily
+on the river that not a star was seen.  This was followed by driving
+rain and wind.  Mackenzie hoisted a three-foot sail and cut over the
+water before the wind with the hiss of a boiling kettle.  Though the
+sail did the work of the paddles, it gave the _voyageurs_ no respite.
+Cramped and rain-soaked, they had to bail out water to keep the canoe
+afloat.  In this fashion the boats entered Slave Lake, a large body of
+water with one horn pointing west, the other east.  Out of both horns
+led unknown rivers.  Which way should Mackenzie go?  Low-lying
+marshlands--beaver meadows where the wattled houses of the beaver had
+stopped up the current of streams till moss overgrew the swamps and the
+land became quaking muskeg--lay along the shores of the lake.  There
+were islands in deep water, where caribou had taken refuge, travelling
+over ice in winter for the calves to be safe in summer from wolf pack
+and bear.  Mackenzie hired a guide from the Slave Indians to pilot the
+canoes over the lake; but the man proved useless.  Days were wasted
+poking through mist and rushes trying to find an outlet to the Grand
+River of the North.  Finally, English Chief lost his temper and
+threatened to kill the Slave Indian unless he succeeded in taking the
+canoes out of the lake.  The waters presently narrowed to half a mile;
+the current began to race with a hiss; sails were hoisted on
+fishing-poles; and Mackenzie found himself out of the rushes on the
+Grand River to the west of Slave Lake.
+
+[Illustration: Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake
+Superior.]
+
+Here pause was made at a camp of Dog Ribs, who took the bottom from the
+courage of Mackenzie's comrades by gruesome predictions that old age
+would come upon the _voyageurs_ before they reached salt water.  There
+were impassable falls ahead.  The river flowed through a land of famine
+peopled by a monstrous race of hostiles who massacred all Indians from
+the South.  The effect of these cheerful prophecies was that the Slave
+Lake guide refused to go on.  English Chief bodily put the recalcitrant
+into a canoe and forced him ahead at the end of a paddle.  Snow-capped
+mountains loomed to the west.  The river from Bear Lake was passed,
+greenish of hue like the sea, and the Slave Lake guide now feigned such
+illness that watch was kept day and night to prevent his escape.  The
+river now began to wind, with lofty ramparts on each side; and once, at
+a sharp bend in the current, Mackenzie looked back to see Slave Lake
+Indians following to aid the guide in escaping.  After that one of the
+white men slept with the fellow each night to prevent desertion; but
+during the confusion of a terrific thunder-storm, when tents and
+cooking utensils were hurled about their heads, the Slave succeeded in
+giving his watchers the slip.  Mackenzie promptly stopped at an
+encampment of strange Indians, and failing to obtain another guide by
+persuasion, seized and hoisted a protesting savage into the big canoe,
+and signalled the unwilling captive to point the way.  The Indians of
+the river were indifferent, if not friendly; but once Mackenzie
+discovered a band hiding their women and children as soon as the
+boatmen came in view.  The unwilling guide was forced ashore, as
+interpreter, and gifts pacified all fear.  But the incident left its
+impression on Mackenzie's comrades.  They had now been away from
+Chipewyan for forty days.  If it took much longer to go back, ice would
+imprison them in the polar wilderness.  Snow lay drifted in the
+valleys, and scarcely any game was seen but fox and grouse.  The river
+was widening almost to the dimensions of a lake, and when this was
+whipped by a north wind the canoes were in peril enough.  The four
+Canadians besought Mackenzie to return.  To return Mackenzie had not
+the slightest intention; but he would not tempt mutiny.  He promised
+that if he did not find the sea within seven days, he would go back.
+
+That night the sun hung so high above the southern horizon that the men
+rose by mistake to embark at twelve o'clock.  They did not realize that
+they were in the region of midnight sun; but Mackenzie knew and
+rejoiced, for he must be near the sea.  The next day he was not
+surprised to find a deserted Eskimo village.  At that sight the
+enthusiasm of the others took fire.  They were keen to reach the sea,
+and imagined that they smelt salt water.  In spite of the lakelike
+expanse of the river, the current was swift, and the canoes went ahead
+at the rate of sixty and seventy miles a day--if it could be called day
+when there was no night.  Between the 13th and 14th of July the
+_voyageurs_ suddenly awakened to find themselves and their baggage
+floating in rising water.  What had happened to the lake?  Their hearts
+took a leap; for it was no lake.  It was the tide.  They had found the
+sea.
+
+How hilariously jubilant were Mackenzie's men, one may guess from the
+fact that they chased whales all the next day in their canoes.  The
+whales dived below, fortunately; for one blow of a finback or sulphur
+bottom would have played skittles with the canoes.  Coming back from
+the whale hunt, triumphant as if they had caught a dozen finbacks, the
+men erected a post, engraving on it the date, July 14, 1789, and the
+names of all present.
+
+It had taken six weeks to reach the Arctic.  It took eight to return to
+Chipewyan, for the course was against stream, in many places tracking
+the canoes by a tow-line.  The beaver meadows along the shore impeded
+the march.  Many a time the quaking moss gave way, and the men sank to
+mid-waist in water.  While skirting close ashore, Mackenzie discovered
+the banks of the river to be on fire.  The fire was a natural tar bed,
+which the Indians said had been burning for centuries and which burns
+to-day as when Mackenzie found it.  On September 12, with a high sail
+up and a driving wind, the canoes cut across Lake Athabasca and reached
+the beach of Chipewyan at three in the afternoon, after one hundred and
+two days' absence.  Mackenzie had not found the Northwest Passage.  He
+had proved there was no Northwest Passage, and discovered the
+Mississippi of the north--Mackenzie River.
+
+[Illustration: Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River.]
+
+Mackenzie spent the long winter at Fort Chipewyan; but just as soon as
+the rivers cleared of ice, he took passage in the east-bound canoes and
+hurried down to the Grand Portage or Fort William on Lake Superior, the
+headquarters of the Northwest Company, where he reported his discovery
+of Mackenzie River.  His report was received with utter indifference.
+The company had other matters to think about.  It was girding itself
+for the life-and-death struggle with its rival, the Hudson's Bay
+Company.  "My expedition was hardly spoken of, but that is what I
+expected," he writes to his cousin.  But chagrin did not deter purpose.
+He asked the directors' permission to explore that other broad
+stream--Peace River--rolling down from the mountains.  His request was
+granted.  Winter saw him on furlough in England, studying astronomy and
+surveying for the next expedition.  Here he heard much of the Western
+Sea--the Pacific--that fired his eagerness.  The voyages of Cook and
+Hanna and Meares were on everybody's lips.  Spain and England and
+Russia were each pushing for first possession of the northwest coast.
+Mackenzie hurried back to his Company's fort on the banks of Peace
+River, where he spent a restless winter waiting for navigation to open.
+Doubts of his own ambitions began to trouble him.  What if Peace River
+did not lead to the west coast at all?  What if he were behind some
+other discoverer sent out by the Spaniards or the Russians?  "I have
+been so vexed of late that I cannot sit down to anything steadily," he
+confesses in a letter to his cousin.  Such a tissue-paper wall
+separates the aims of the real hero from those of the fool, that almost
+every ambitious man must pass through these periods of self-doubt
+before reaching the goal of his hopes.  But despondency did not benumb
+Mackenzie into apathy, as it has weaker men.
+
+By April he had shipped the year's furs from the forks of Peace River
+to Chipewyan.  By May his season's work was done.  He was ready to go
+up Peace River.  A birch canoe thirty feet long, lined with lightest of
+cedar, was built.  In this were stored pemmican and powder.  Alexander
+Mackay, a clerk of the company, was chosen as first assistant.  Six
+Canadian _voyageurs_--two of whom had accompanied Mackenzie to the
+Arctic--and two Indian hunters made up the party of ten who stepped
+into the canoes at seven in the evening of May 9, 1793.
+
+Peace River tore down from the mountains flooded with spring thaw.  The
+crew soon realized that paddles must be bent against the current of a
+veritable mill-race; but it was safer going against, than with, such a
+current, for unknown dangers could be seen from below instead of above,
+where suction would whirl a canoe on the rocks.  Keen air foretold the
+nearing mountains.  In less than a week snow-capped peaks had crowded
+the canoe in a narrow canon below a tumbling cascade where the river
+was one wild sheet of tossing foam as far as eye could see.  The
+difficulty was to land; for precipices rose on each side in a wall,
+down which rolled enormous boulders and land-slides of loose earth.  To
+_portage_ goods up these walls was impossible.  Fastening an
+eighty-foot tow-line to the bow, Mackenzie leaped to the declivity, axe
+in hand, cut foothold along the face of the steep cliff to a place
+where he could jump to level rock, and then, turning, signalled through
+the roar of the rapids for his men to come on.  The _voyageurs_ were
+paralyzed with fear.  They stripped themselves ready to swim if they
+missed the jump, then one by one vaulted from foothold to foothold
+where Mackenzie had cut till they came to the final jump across water.
+Here Mackenzie caught each on his shoulders as the _voyageurs_ leaped.
+The tow-line was then passed round trees growing on the edge of the
+precipice, and the canoe tracked up the raging cascade.  The waves
+almost lashed the frail craft to pieces.  Once a wave caught her
+sideways; the tow-line snapped like a pistol shot, for just one instant
+the canoe hung poised, and then the back-wash of an enormous boulder
+drove her bow foremost ashore, where the _voyageurs_ regained the
+tow-line.
+
+[Illustration: Slave Lake Indians.]
+
+The men had not bargained on this kind of work.  They bluntly declared
+that it was absurd trying to go up canons with such cascades.
+Mackenzie paid no heed to the murmurings.  He got his crew to the top
+of the hill, spread out the best of a regale--including tea sweetened
+with sugar--and while the men were stimulating courage by a feast, he
+went ahead to reconnoitre the gorge.  Windfalls of enormous spruce
+trees, with a thickness twice the height of a man, lay on a steep
+declivity of sliding rock.  Up this climbed Mackenzie, clothes torn to
+tatters by devil's club (a thorn bush with spines like needles), boots
+hacked to pieces by the sharp rocks, and feet gashed with cuts.  The
+prospect was not bright.  As far as he could see the river was one
+succession of cataracts fifty feet wide walled in by stupendous
+precipices, down which rolled great boulders, shattering to pebbles as
+they fell.  The men were right.  No canoe could go up that stream.
+Mackenzie came back, set his men to repairing the canoe and making axe
+handles, to avoid the idleness that breeds mutiny, and sent Mackay
+ahead to see how far the rapids extended.  Mackay reported that the
+_portage_ would be nine miles over the mountain.
+
+Leading the way, axe in hand, Mackenzie began felling trees so that the
+trunks formed an outer railing to prevent a fall down the precipice.
+Up this trail they warped the canoe by pulling the tow-line round
+stumps, five men going in advance to cut the way, five hauling and
+pushing the canoe.  In one day progress was three miles.  By five in
+the afternoon the men were so exhausted that they went to bed--if bare
+ground with sky overhead could be called bed.  One thing alone
+encouraged them: as they rose higher up the mountain side, they saw
+that the green edges of the glaciers and the eternal snows projected
+over the precipices.  They were nearing the summit--they must surely
+soon cross the Divide.  The air grew colder.  For three days the
+choppers worked in their blanket coats.  When they finally got the
+canoe down to the river-bed, it was to see another range of impassable
+mountains barring the way westward.  All that kept Mackenzie's men from
+turning back was that awful _portage_ of nine miles.  Nothing ahead
+could be worse than what lay behind; so they embarked, following the
+south branch where the river forked.  The stream was swift as a
+cascade.  Half the crew walked to lighten the canoe and prevent grazing
+on the rocky bottoms.
+
+Once, at dusk, when walkers and paddlers happened to have camped on
+opposite shores, the marchers came dashing across stream, wading
+neck-high, with news that they had heard the firearms of Indian
+raiders.  Fires were put out, muskets loaded, and each man took his
+station at the foot of a tree, where all passed a sleepless night.  No
+hostiles appeared.  The noise was probably falling avalanches.  And
+once when Mackenzie and Mackay had gone ahead with the Indian
+interpreters, they came back to find that the canoe had disappeared.
+In vain they kindled fires, fired guns, set branches adrift on the
+swift current as a signal--no response came from the _voyageurs_.  The
+boatmen evidently did not wish to be found.  What Mackenzie's
+suspicions were one may guess.  It would be easier for the crew to
+float back down Peace River than pull against this terrific current
+with more _portages_ over mountains.  The Indians became so alarmed
+that they wanted to build a raft forthwith and float back to Chipewyan.
+The abandoned party had not tasted a bite of food for twenty-four
+hours.  They had not even seen a grouse, and in their powder horns were
+only a few rounds of ammunition.  Separating, Mackenzie and his Indian
+went up-stream, Mackay and his went down-stream, each agreeing to
+signal the other by gunshots if either found the canoe.  Barefooted and
+drenched in a terrific thunderstorm, Mackenzie wandered on till
+darkness shrouded the forest.  He had just lain down on a soaking couch
+of spruce boughs when the ricochetting echo of a gun set the boulders
+crashing down the precipices.  Hurrying down-stream, he found Mackay at
+the canoe.  The crew pretended that a leakage about the keel had caused
+delay; but the canoe did not substantiate the excuse.  Mackenzie said
+nothing; but he never again allowed the crew out of his sight on the
+east side of the mountains.
+
+So far there had been no sign of Indians among the mountains; and now
+the canoe was gliding along calm waters when savages suddenly sprang
+out of a thicket, brandishing spears.  The crew became panic-stricken;
+but Mackenzie stepped fearlessly ashore, offered the hostiles presents,
+shook hands, and made his camp with them.  The savages told him that he
+was nearing a _portage_ across the Divide.  One of them went with
+Mackenzie the next day as guide.  The river narrowed to a small
+tarn--the source of Peace River; and a short _portage_ over rocky
+ground brought the canoe to a second tarn emptying into a river that,
+to Mackenzie's disappointment, did not flow west, but south.  He had
+crossed the Divide, the first white man to cross the continent in the
+North; but how could he know whether to follow this stream?  It might
+lead east to the Saskatchewan.  As a matter of fact, he was on the
+sources of the Fraser, that winds for countless leagues south through
+the mountains before turning westward for the Pacific.
+
+Full of doubt and misgivings, uncertain whether he had crossed the
+Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river.  Snowy
+peaks were on every side.  Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy
+green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river
+was hemmed in by shadowy canons with roaring cascades that compelled
+frequent _portage_.  Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to
+lighten the canoe and look out for danger; but fear had got in the
+marrow of his men.  They thought that he was trying to avoid risks to
+which he was exposing them; and they compelled him to embark, vowing,
+if they were to perish, he was to perish with them.
+
+To quiet their fears, Mackenzie embarked with them.  Barely had they
+pushed out when the canoe was caught by a sucking undercurrent which
+the paddlers could not stem--a terrific rip told them that the canoe
+had struck--the rapids whirled her sideways and away she went
+down-stream--the men jumped out, but the current carried them to such
+deep water that they were clinging to the gunwales as best they could
+when, with another rip, the stern was torn clean out of the canoe.  The
+blow sent her swirling--another rock battered the bow out--the keel
+flattened like a raft held together only by the bars.  Branches hung
+overhead.  The bowman made a frantic grab at these to stop the rush of
+the canoe--he was hoisted clear from his seat and dropped ashore.
+Mackenzie jumped out up to his waist in ice-water.  The steersman had
+yelled for each to save himself; but Mackenzie shouted out a
+countermand for every man to hold on to the gunwales.  In this fashion
+they were all dragged several hundred yards till a whirl sent the wreck
+into a shallow eddy.  The men got their feet on bottom, and the
+wreckage was hauled ashore.  During the entire crisis the Indians sat
+on top of the canoe, howling with terror.
+
+All the bullets had been lost.  A few were recovered.  Powder was
+spread out to dry; and the men flatly refused to go one foot farther.
+Mackenzie listened to the revolt without a word.  He got their clothes
+dry and their benumbed limbs warmed over a roaring fire.  He fed them
+till their spirits had risen.  Then he quietly remarked that the
+experience would teach them how to run rapids in the future.  Men of
+the North--to turn back?  Such a thing had never been known in the
+history of the Northwest Fur Company.  It would disgrace them forever.
+Think of the honor of conquering disaster.  Then he vowed that he would
+go ahead, whether the men accompanied him or not.  Then he set them to
+patching the canoe with oil-cloth and bits of bark; but large sheets of
+birch bark are rare in the Rockies; and the patched canoe weighed so
+heavily that the men could scarcely carry it.  It took them fourteen
+hours to make the three-mile _portage_ of these rapids.  The Indian
+from the mountain tribe had lost heart.  Mackenzie and Mackay watched
+him by turns at night; but the fellow got away under cover of darkness,
+the crew conniving at the escape in order to compel Mackenzie to turn
+back.  Finally the river wound into a large stream on the west side of
+the main range of the Rockies.  Mackenzie had crossed the Divide.
+
+For a week after crossing the Divide, the canoe followed the course of
+the river southward.  This was not what Mackenzie expected.  He sought
+a stream flowing directly westward, and was keenly alert for sign of
+Indian encampment where he might learn the shortest way to the Western
+Sea.  Once the smoke of a camp-fire rose through the bordering forest;
+but no sooner had Mackenzie's interpreters approached than the savages
+fired volley after volley of arrows and swiftly decamped, leaving no
+trace of a trail.  There was nothing to do but continue down the
+devious course of the uncertain river.  The current was swift and the
+outlook cut off by the towering mountains; but in a bend of the river
+they came on an Indian canoe drawn ashore.  A savage was just emerging
+from a side stream when Mackenzie's men came in view.  With a wild
+whoop, the fellow made off for the woods; and in a trice the narrow
+river was lined with naked warriors, brandishing spears and displaying
+the most outrageous hostility.  When Mackenzie attempted to land,
+arrows hissed past the canoe, which they might have punctured and sunk.
+Determined to learn the way westward from these Indians, Mackenzie
+tried strategy.  He ordered his men to float some distance from the
+savages.  Then he landed alone on the shore opposite the hostiles,
+having sent one of his interpreters by a detour through the woods to
+lie in ambush with fusee ready for instant action.  Throwing aside
+weapons, Mackenzie displayed tempting trinkets.  The warriors
+conferred, hesitated, jumped in the canoes, and came, backing stern
+foremost, toward Mackenzie.  He threw out presents.  They came ashore
+and were presently sitting by his side.
+
+From them he learned the river he was following ran for "many moons"
+through the "shining mountains" before it reached the "midday sun."  It
+was barred by fearful rapids; but by retracing the way back up the
+river, the white men could leave the canoe at a carrying place and go
+overland to the salt water in eleven days.  From other tribes down the
+same river, Mackenzie gathered similar facts.  He knew that the stream
+was misleading him; but a retrograde movement up such a current would
+discourage his men.  He had only one month's provisions left.  His
+ammunition had dwindled to one hundred and fifty bullets and thirty
+pounds of shot.  Instead of folding his hands in despondency, Mackenzie
+resolved to set the future at defiance and go on.  From the Indians he
+obtained promise of a man to guide him back.  Then he frankly laid all
+the difficulties before his followers, declaring that he was going on
+alone and they need not continue unless they voluntarily decided to do
+so.  His dogged courage was contagious.  The speech was received with
+huzzas, and the canoe was headed upstream.
+
+The Indian guide was to join Mackenzie higher upstream; but the
+reappearance of the white men when they had said they would not be back
+for "many moons" roused the suspicions of the savages.  The shores were
+lined with warriors who would receive no explanation that Mackenzie
+tried to give in sign language.  The canoe began to leak so badly that
+the boatmen had to spend half the time bailing out water; and the
+_voyageurs_ dared not venture ashore for resin.  Along the river cliff
+was a little three-cornered hut of thatched clay.  Here Mackenzie took
+refuge, awaiting the return of the savage who had promised to act as
+guide.  The three walls protected the rear, but the front of the hut
+was exposed to the warriors across the river; and the whites dared not
+kindle a fire that might serve as a target.  Two nights were passed in
+this hazardous shelter, Mackay and Mackenzie alternately lying in their
+cloaks on the wet rocks, keeping watch.  At midnight of the third day's
+siege, a rustling came from the woods to the rear and the boatmen's dog
+set up a furious barking.  The men were so frightened that they three
+times loaded the canoe to desert their leader, but something in the
+fearless confidence of the explorer deterred them.  As daylight sifted
+through the forest, Mackenzie descried a vague object creeping through
+the underbrush.  A less fearless man would have fired and lost all.
+Mackenzie dashed out to find the cause of alarm an old blind man,
+almost in convulsions from fear.  He had been driven from this river
+hut.  Mackenzie quieted his terror with food.  By signs the old man
+explained that the Indians had suspected treachery when the whites
+returned so soon; and by signs Mackenzie requested him to guide the
+canoe back up the river to the carrying place; but the old creature
+went off in such a palsy of fear that he had to be lifted bodily into
+the canoe.  The situation was saved.  The hostiles could not fire
+without wounding one of their own people; and the old man could explain
+the real reason for Mackenzie's return.  Rations had been reduced to
+two meals a day.  The men were still sulking from the perils of the
+siege when the canoe struck a stump that knocked a hole in the keel,
+"which," reports Mackenzie, laconically, "gave them all an opportunity
+to let loose their discontent without reserve."  Camp after camp they
+passed, which the old man's explanations pacified, till they at length
+came to the carrying place.  Here, to the surprise and delight of all,
+the guide awaited them.
+
+[Illustration: Good Hope, Mackenzie River.  Hudson's Bay Company Fort.]
+
+On July 4, provisions were _cached_, the canoe abandoned, and a start
+made overland westward, each carrying ninety pounds of provisions
+besides musket and pistols.  And this burden was borne on the rations
+of two scant meals a day.  The way was ridgy, steep, and obstructed by
+windfalls.  At cloud-line, the rocks were slippery as glass from
+moisture, and Mackenzie led the way, beating the drip from the branches
+as they marched.  The record was twelve miles the first day.  When it
+rained, the shelter was a piece of oil-cloth held up in an extemporized
+tent, the men crouching to sleep as best they could.  The way was well
+beaten and camp was frequently made for the night with strange Indians,
+from whom fresh guides were hired; but when he did not camp with the
+natives, Mackenzie watched his guide by sleeping with him.  Though the
+fellow was malodorous from fish oil and infested with vermin, Mackenzie
+would spread his cloak in such a way that escape was impossible without
+awakening himself.  No sentry was kept at night.  All hands were too
+deadly tired from the day's climb.  Once, in the impenetrable gloom of
+the midnight forest, Mackenzie was awakened by a plaintive chant in a
+kind of unearthly music.  A tribe was engaged in religious devotions to
+some woodland deity.  Totem poles of cedar, carved with the heads of
+animals emblematic of family clans, told Mackenzie that he was nearing
+the coast tribes.  Barefooted, with ankles swollen and clothes torn to
+shreds, they had crossed the last range of mountains within two weeks
+of leaving the inland river.  They now embarked with some natives for
+the sea.
+
+One can guess how Mackenzie's heart thrilled as they swept down the
+swift river--six miles an hour--past fishing weirs and Indian camps,
+till at last, far out between the mountains, he descried the narrow arm
+of the blue, limitless sea.  The canoe leaked like a sieve; but what
+did that matter?  At eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, July 20,
+the river carried them to a wide lagoon, lapped by a tide, with the
+seaweed waving for miles along the shore.  Morning fog still lay on the
+far-billowing ocean.  Sea otters tumbled over the slimy rocks with
+discordant cries.  Gulls darted overhead; and past the canoe dived the
+great floundering grampus.  There was no mistaking.  This was the
+sea--the Western Sea, that for three hundred years had baffled all
+search overland, and led the world's greatest explorers on a chase of a
+will-o'-the-wisp.  What Cartier and La Salle and La Verendrye failed to
+do, Mackenzie had accomplished.
+
+But Mackenzie's position was not to be envied.  Ten starving men on a
+barbarous coast had exactly twenty pounds of pemmican, fifteen of rice,
+six of flour.  Of ammunition there was scarcely any.  Between home and
+their leaky canoe lay half a continent of wilderness and mountains.
+The next day was spent coasting the cove for a place to take
+observations.  Canoes of savages met the white men, and one impudent
+fellow kept whining out that he had once been shot at by men of
+Mackenzie's color.  Mackenzie took refuge for the night on an isolated
+rock which was barely large enough for his party to gain a foothold.
+The savages hung about pestering the boatmen for gifts.  Two white men
+kept guard, while the rest slept.  On Monday, when Mackenzie was
+setting up his instruments, his young Indian guide came, foaming at the
+mouth from terror, with news that the coast tribes were to attack the
+white men by hurling spears at the unsheltered rock.  The boatmen lost
+their heads and were for instant flight, anywhere, everywhere, in a
+leaky canoe that would have foundered a mile out at sea.  Mackenzie did
+not stir, but ordered fusees primed and the canoe gummed.  Mixing up a
+pot of vermilion, he painted in large letters on the face of the rock
+where they had passed the night:--
+
+"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July,
+one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three."
+
+The canoe was then headed eastward for the homeward trip.  Only once
+was the explorer in great danger on his return.  It was just as the
+canoe was leaving tide-water for the river.  The young Indian guide led
+him full tilt into the village of hostiles that had besieged the rock.
+Mackenzie was alone, his men following with the baggage.  Barely had he
+reached the woods when two savages sprang out, with daggers in hand
+ready to strike.  Quick as a flash, Mackenzie quietly raised his gun.
+They dropped back; but he was surrounded by a horde led by the impudent
+chief of the attack on the rock the first night on the sea.  One
+warrior grasped Mackenzie from behind.  In the scuffle hat and cloak
+came off; but Mackenzie shook himself free, got his sword out, and
+succeeded in holding the shouting rabble at bay till his men came.
+Then such was his rage at the indignity that he ordered his followers
+in line with loaded fusees, marched to the village, demanded the return
+of the hat and cloak, and obtained a peace-offering of fish as well.
+The Indians knew the power of firearms, and fell at his feet in
+contrition.  Mackenzie named this camp Rascal Village.
+
+At another time his men lost heart so completely over the difficulties
+ahead that they threw everything they were carrying into the river.
+Mackenzie patiently sat on a stone till they had recovered from their
+panic.  Then he reasoned and coaxed and dragooned them into the spirit
+of courage that at last brought them safely over mountain and through
+canon to Peace River.  On August 24, a sharp bend in the river showed
+them the little home fort which they had left four months before.  The
+joy of the _voyageurs_ fairly exploded.  They beat their paddles on the
+canoe, fired off all the ammunition that remained, waved flags, and set
+the cliffs ringing with shouts.
+
+Mackenzie spent the following winter at Chipewyan, despondent and
+lonely.  "What a situation, starving and alone!" he writes to his
+cousin.  The hard life was beginning to wear down the dauntless spirit.
+"I spend the greater part of my time in vague speculations. . . .  In
+fact my mind was never at ease, nor could I bend it to my wishes.
+Though I am not superstitious, my dreams cause me great annoyance.  I
+scarcely close my eyes without finding myself in company with the dead."
+
+The following winter Mackenzie left the West never to return.  The
+story of his travels was published early in the nineteenth century, and
+he was knighted by the English king.  The remainder of his life was
+spent quietly on an estate in Scotland, where he died in 1820.
+
+[Illustration: The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight
+Sun.--C. W. Mathers.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+1803-1806
+
+LEWIS AND CLARK
+
+The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend the
+Columbia to the Pacific--Exciting Adventures on the Canons of the
+Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone--Lewis'
+Escape from Hostiles
+
+
+The spring of 1904 witnessed the centennial celebration of an area as
+large as half the kingdoms of Europe, that has the unique distinction of
+having transferred its allegiance to three different flags within
+twenty-four hours.
+
+At the opening of the nineteenth century Spain had ceded all the region
+vaguely known as Louisiana back to France, and France had sold the
+territory, to the United States; but post-horse and stage of those old
+days travelled slowly.  News of Spain's cession and France's sale reached
+Louisiana almost simultaneously.  On March 9, 1804, the Spanish grandees
+of St. Louis took down their flag and, to the delight of Louisiana, for
+form's sake erected French colors.  On March 10, the French flag was
+lowered for the emblem that has floated over the Great West ever
+since--the stars and stripes.  How vast was the new territory acquired,
+the eastern states had not the slightest conception.  As early as 1792
+Captain Gray, of the ship _Columbia_, from Boston, had blundered into the
+harbor of a vast river flowing into the Pacific.  What lay between this
+river and that other great river on the eastern side of the
+mountains--the Missouri?  Jefferson had arranged with John Ledyard of
+Connecticut, who had been with Captain Cook on the Pacific, to explore
+the northwest coast of America by crossing Russia overland; but Russia
+had similar designs for herself, and stopped Ledyard on the way.  In 1803
+President Jefferson asked Congress for an appropriation to explore the
+Northwest by way of the Missouri.  Now that the wealth of the West is
+beyond the estimate of any figure, it seems almost inconceivable that
+there were people little-minded enough to haggle over the price paid for
+Louisiana--$15,000,000--and to object to the appropriation required for
+its exploration--$2500; but fortunately the world goes ahead in spite of
+hagglers.
+
+May of 1804 saw Captain Meriwether Lewis, formerly secretary to President
+Jefferson, and Captain William Clark of Virginia launch out from Wood
+River opposite St. Louis, where they had kept their men encamped all
+winter on the east side of the Mississippi, waiting until the formal
+transfer of Louisiana for the long journey of exploration to the sources
+of the Missouri and the Columbia.  Their escort consisted of twenty
+soldiers, eleven _voyageurs_, and nine frontiersmen.  The main craft was
+a keel boat fifty-five feet long, of light draft, with square-rigged sail
+and twenty-two oars, and tow-line fastened to the mast pole to track the
+boat upstream through rapids.  An American flag floated from the prow,
+and behind the flag the universal types of progress everywhere--goods for
+trade and a swivel-gun.  Horses were led alongshore for hunting, and two
+pirogues--sharp at prow, broad at stern, like a flat-iron or a
+turtle--glided to the fore of the keel boat.
+
+[Illustration: Captain Meriwether Lewis.]
+
+The Missouri was at flood tide, turbid with crumbling clay banks and
+great trees torn out by the roots, from which keel boat and pirogues
+sheered safely off.  For the first time in history the Missouri resounded
+to the Fourth of July guns; and round camp-fire the men danced to the
+strains of a _voyageur's_ fiddle.  Usually, among forty men is one
+traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife;
+but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the
+lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the
+Platte, down the Osage, down the Missouri, with canoe loads of furs for
+St. Louis.  These men foregathered with the _voyageurs_ and told only too
+true stories of the dangers ahead.  Fires kindled on the banks of the
+river called neighboring Indians to council.  Council Bluffs commemorates
+one conference, of which there were many with Iowas and Omahas and
+Ricarees and Sioux.  Pause was made on the south side of the Missouri to
+visit the high mound where Blackbird, chief of the Omahas, was buried
+astride his war horse that his spirit might forever watch the French
+_voyageurs_ passing up and down the river.
+
+[Illustration: Captain William Clark.]
+
+By October the explorers were sixteen hundred miles north of St. Louis,
+at the Mandan villages near where Bismarck stands to-day.  The Mandans
+welcomed the white men; but the neighboring tribes of Ricarees were
+insolent.  "Had I these white warriors on the upper plains," boasted a
+chief to Charles Mackenzie, one of the Northwest Fur Company men from
+Canada, "my young men on horseback would finish them as they would so
+many wolves; for there are only two sensible men among them, the worker
+of iron [blacksmith] and the mender of guns."  Four Canadian traders had
+already been massacred by this chief.  Captain Lewis knew that his
+company must winter on the east side of the mountains, and there were a
+dozen traders--Hudson Bay and Nor'westers--on the ground practising all
+the unscrupulous tricks of rivals, Nor'westers driving off Hudson Bay
+horses, Hudson Bay men driving off Nor'-westers', to defeat trade; so
+Captain Lewis at once had a fort constructed.  It was triangular in
+shape, the two converging walls consisting of barracks with a loopholed
+bastion at the apex, the base being a high wall of strong pickets where
+sentry kept constant guard.  Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to
+secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians;
+but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he
+luckily engaged an old Nor'wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife,
+Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.[1]  On
+Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan;
+and all that night the men danced hilariously.  On New Years of 1805, the
+white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one _voyageur_ danced "on his
+head" to the uproarious applause of the savages.  All winter the men
+joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican.  In February,
+work was begun on the small boats for the ascent of the Missouri.  By the
+end of March, the river had cleared of ice, and a dozen men were sent
+back to St. Louis.
+
+At five, in the afternoon of April 7, six canoes and two pirogues were
+pushed out on the Missouri.  Sails were hoisted; a cheer from the
+Canadian traders and Indians standing on the shore--and the boats glided
+up the Missouri with flags flying from foremost prow.  Hitherto Lewis and
+Clark had passed over travelled ground.  Now they had set sail for the
+Unknown.  Within a week they had passed the Little Missouri, the height
+of land that divides the waters of the Missouri from those of the
+Saskatchewan, and the great Yellowstone River, first found by wandering
+French trappers and now for the first time explored.  The current of the
+Missouri grew swifter, the banks steeper, and the use of the tow-line
+more frequent.  The voyage was no more the holiday trip that it had been
+all the way from St. Louis.  Hunters were kept on the banks to forage for
+game, and once four of them came so suddenly on an open-mouthed,
+ferocious old bear that he had turned hunter and they hunted before guns
+could be loaded; and the men saved themselves only by jumping twenty feet
+over the bank into the river.
+
+For miles the boats had to be tracked up-stream by the tow-line.  The
+shore was so steep that it offered no foothold.  Men and stones slithered
+heterogeneously down the sliding gravel into the water.  Moccasins wore
+out faster than they could be sewed; and the men's feet were cut by
+prickly-pear and rock as if by knives.  On Sunday, May 26, when Captain
+Lewis was marching to lighten the canoes, he had just climbed to the
+summit of a high, broken cliff when there burst on his glad eyes a first
+glimpse of the far, white "Shining Mountains" of which the Indians told,
+the Rockies, snowy and dazzling in the morning sun.  One can guess how
+the weather-bronzed, ragged man paused to gaze on the glimmering summits.
+Only one other explorer had ever been so far west in this region--young
+De la Verendrye, fifty years before; but the Frenchman had been compelled
+to turn back without crossing the mountains, and the two Americans were
+to assail and conquer what had proved an impassable barrier.  The
+Missouri had become too deep for poles, too swift for paddles; and the
+banks were so precipitous that the men were often poised at dizzy heights
+above the river, dragging the tow-line round the edge of rock and crumbly
+cliff.  Captain Lewis was leading the way one day, crawling along the
+face of a rock wall, when he slipped.  Only a quick thrust of his
+spontoon into the cliff saved him from falling almost a hundred feet.  He
+had just struck it with terrific force into the rock, where it gave him
+firm handhold, when he heard a voice cry, "Good God, Captain, what shall
+I do?"
+
+[Illustration: Tracking Up-stream.]
+
+Windsor, a frontiersman, had slipped to the very verge of the rock, where
+he lay face down with right arm and leg completely over the precipice,
+his left hand vainly grabbing empty air for grip of anything that would
+hold him back.  Captain Lewis was horrified, but kept his presence of
+mind; for the man's life hung by a thread.  A move, a turn, the slightest
+start of alarm to disturb Windsor's balance--and he was lost.  Steadying
+his voice, Captain Lewis shouted back, "You're in little danger.  Stick
+your knife in the cliff to hoist yourself up."
+
+With the leverage of the knife, Windsor succeeded in lifting himself back
+to the narrow ledge.  Then taking off his moccasins, he crawled along the
+cliff to broader foothold.  Lewis sent word for the crews to wade the
+margin of the river instead of attempting this pass--which they did,
+though shore water was breast high and ice cold.
+
+[Illustration: Typical Mountain Trapper.]
+
+The Missouri had now become so narrow that it was hard to tell which was
+the main river and which a tributary; so Captain Lewis and four men went
+in advance to find the true course.  Leaving camp at sunrise, Captain
+Lewis was crossing a high, bare plain, when he heard the most musical of
+all wilderness sounds--the far rushing that is the voice of many waters.
+Far above the prairie there shimmered in the morning sun a gigantic plume
+of spray.  Surely this was the Great Falls of which the Indians told.
+Lewis and his men broke into a run across the open for seven miles, the
+rush of waters increasing to a deafening roar, the plume of spray to
+clouds of foam.  Cliffs two hundred feet high shut off the view.  Down
+these scrambled Lewis, not daring to look away from his feet till safely
+at bottom, when he faced about to see the river compressed by sheer
+cliffs over which hurled a white cataract in one smooth sheet eighty feet
+high.  The spray tossed up in a thousand bizarre shapes of wind-driven
+clouds.  Captain Lewis drew the long sigh of the thing accomplished.  He
+had found the Great Falls of the Missouri.
+
+[Illustration: The Discovery of the Great Falls.]
+
+Seating himself on the rock, he awaited his hunters.  That night they
+camped under a tree near the falls.  Morning showed that the river was
+one succession of falls and rapids for eighteen miles.  Here was indeed a
+stoppage to the progress of the boats.  Sending back word to Captain
+Clark of the discovery of the falls, Lewis had ascended the course of the
+cascades to a high hill when he suddenly encountered a herd of a thousand
+buffalo.  It was near supper-time.  Quick as thought, Lewis fired.  What
+was his amazement to see a huge bear leap from the furze to pounce on the
+wounded quarry; and what was Bruin's amazement to see the unusual
+spectacle of a thing as small as a man marching out to contest possession
+of that quarry?  Man and bear reared up to look at each other.  Bear had
+been master in these regions from time immemorial.  Man or beast--which
+was to be master now?  Lewis had aimed his weapon to fire again, when he
+recollected that it was not loaded; and the bear was coming on too fast
+for time to recharge.  Captain Lewis was a brave man and a dignified man;
+but the plain was bare of tree or brush, and the only safety was
+inglorious flight.  But if he had to retreat, the captain determined that
+he _would_ retreat only at a walk.  The rip of tearing claws sounded from
+behind, and Lewis looked over his shoulder to see the bear at a hulking
+gallop, open-mouthed,--and off they went, explorer and exploited, in a
+sprinting match of eighty yards, when the grunting roar of pursuer told
+pursued that the bear was gaining.  Turning short, Lewis plunged into the
+river to mid-waist and faced about with his spontoon at the bear's nose.
+A sudden turn is an old trick with all Indian hunters; the bear
+floundered back on his haunches, reconsidered the sport of hunting this
+new animal, man, and whirled right about for the dead buffalo.
+
+[Illustration: Fighting a Grizzly.]
+
+It took the crews from the 15th to the 25th of June to _portage_ past the
+Great Falls.  Cottonwood trees yielded carriage wheels two feet in
+diameter, and the masts of the pirogues made axletrees.  On these
+wagonettes the canoes were dragged across the _portage_.  It was hard,
+hot work.  Grizzlies prowled round the camp at night, wakening the
+exhausted workers.  The men actually fell asleep on their feet as they
+toiled, and spent half the night double-soling their torn moccasins, for
+the cactus already had most of the men limping from festered feet.  Yet
+not one word of complaint was uttered; and once, when the men were camped
+on a green along the _portage_, a _voyageur_ got out his fiddle, and the
+sore feet danced, which was more wholesome than moping or poulticing.
+The boldness of the grizzlies was now explained.  Antelope and buffalo
+were carried over the falls.  The bears prowled below for the carrion.
+
+After failure to construct good hide boats, two other craft, twenty-five
+and thirty-three feet long, were knocked together, and the crews launched
+above the rapids for the far Shining Mountains that lured like a
+mariner's beacon.  Night and day, when the sun was hot, came the
+boom-boom as of artillery from the mountains.  The _voyageurs_ thought
+this the explosion of stones, but soon learned to recognize the sound of
+avalanche and land-slide.  The river became narrower, deeper, swifter, as
+the explorers approached the mountains.  For five miles rocks rose on
+each side twelve hundred feet high, sheer as a wall.  Into this shadowy
+canon, silent as death, crept the boats of the white men, vainly
+straining their eyes for glimpse of egress from the watery defile.  A
+word, a laugh, the snatch of a _voyageur's_ ditty, came back with elfin
+echo, as if spirits hung above the dizzy heights spying on the intruders.
+Springs and tenuous, wind-blown falls like water threads trickled down
+each side of the lofty rocks.  The water was so deep that poles did not
+touch bottom, and there was not the width of a foot-hold between water
+and wall for camping ground.  Flags were unfurled from the prows of the
+boats to warn marauding Indians on the height above that the _voyageurs_
+were white men, not enemies.  Darkness fell on the canon with the great
+hushed silence of the mountains; and still the boats must go on and on in
+the darkness, for there was no anchorage.  Finally, above a small island
+in the middle of the river, was found a tiny camping ground with
+pine-drift enough for fire-wood.  Here they landed in the pitchy dark.
+They had entered the Gates of the Rockies on the 19th of July.  In the
+morning bighorn and mountain goat were seen scrambling along the ledges
+above the water.  On the 25th the Three Forks of the Missouri were
+reached.  Here the Indian woman, Sacajawea, recognized the ground and
+practically became the guide of the party, advising the two explorers to
+follow the south fork or the Jefferson, as that was the stream which her
+tribe followed when crossing the mountains to the plains.
+
+[Illustration: Packer carrying Goods across Portage.]
+
+It now became absolutely necessary to find mountain Indians who would
+supply horses and guide the white men across the Divide.  In the hope of
+finding the Indian trail, Captain Lewis landed with two men and preceded
+the boats.  He had not gone five miles when to his sheer delight he saw a
+Snake Indian on horseback.  Ordering his men to keep back, he advanced
+within a mile of the horseman and three times spread his blanket on the
+ground as a signal of friendship.  The horseman sat motionless as bronze.
+Captain Lewis went forward, with trinkets held out to tempt a parley, and
+was within a few hundred yards when the savage wheeled and dashed off.
+Lewis' men had disobeyed orders and frightened the fellow by advancing.
+Deeply chagrined, Lewis hoisted an American flag as sign of friendship
+and continued his march.  Tracks of horses were followed across a bog,
+along what was plainly an Indian road, till the sources of the Missouri
+became so narrow that one of the men put a foot on each side and thanked
+God that he had lived to bestride the Missouri.  Stooping, all drank from
+the crystal spring whose waters they had traced for three thousand miles
+from St. Louis.  Following a steep declivity, they were presently
+crossing the course of a stream that flowed west and must lead to some
+branch of the Columbia.
+
+[Illustration: Spying on an Enemy's Fort.]
+
+Suddenly, on the cliff in front, Captain Lewis discovered two squaws, an
+Indian, and some dogs.  Unfurling his flag, he advanced.  The Indians
+paused, then dashed for the woods.  Lewis tried to tie some presents
+round the dogs' necks as a peace-offering, but the curs made off after
+their master.  The white men had not proceeded a mile before they came to
+three squaws, who never moved but bowed their heads to the ground for the
+expected blow that would make them captives.  Throwing down weapons,
+Lewis pulled up his sleeve to show that he was white.  Presents allayed
+all fear, and the squaws had led him two miles toward their camp when
+sixty warriors came galloping at full speed with arrows levelled.  The
+squaws rushed forward, vociferating and showing their presents.  Three
+chiefs at once dismounted, and fell on Captain Lewis with such greasy
+embraces of welcome that he was glad to end the ceremony.  Pipes were
+smoked, presents distributed, and the white men conducted to a great
+leathern lodge, where Lewis announced his mission and prepared the
+Indians for the coming of the main force in the boats.
+
+[Illustration: Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies.]
+
+The Snakes scarcely knew whether to believe the white man's tale.  The
+Indian camp was short of provisions, and Lewis urged the warriors to come
+back up the trail to meet the advancing boats.  The braves hesitated.
+Cameahwait, the chief, harangued till a dozen warriors mounted their
+horses and set out, Lewis and his men each riding behind an Indian.
+Captain Clark could advance only slowly, and the Indians with Lewis grew
+suspicious as they entered the rocky denies without meeting the
+explorers' party.  Half the Snakes turned back.  Among those that went on
+were three women.  To demonstrate good faith, Lewis again mounted a horse
+behind an Indian, though the bare-back riding over rough ground at a mad
+pace was almost jolting his bones apart.  A spy came back breathless with
+news for the hungry warriors that one of the white hunters had killed a
+deer, and the whole company lashed to a breakneck gallop that nearly
+finished Lewis, who could only cling for dear life to the Indian's waist.
+The poor wretches were so ravenous that they fell on the dead deer and
+devoured it raw.  It was here that Lewis expected the boats.  They were
+not to be seen.  The Indians grew more distrustful.  The chief at once
+put fur collars, after the fashion of Indian dress, round the white men's
+shoulders.  As this was plainly a trick to conceal the whites in case of
+treachery on their part, Lewis at once took off his hat and placed it on
+the chief's head.  Then he hurried the Indians along, lest they should
+lose courage completely.  To his mortification, Captain Clark did not
+appear.  To revive the Indians' courage, the white men then passed their
+guns across to the Snakes, signalling willingness to suffer death if the
+Indians discovered treachery.  That night all the Indians hid in the
+woods but five, who slept on guard round the whites.  If anything had
+stopped Clark's advance, Lewis was lost.  Though neither knew it, Lewis
+and Clark were only four miles apart, Clark, Chaboneau, the guide, and
+Sacajawea, the Indian woman, were walking on the shore early in the
+morning, when the squaw began to dance with signs of the most extravagant
+joy.  Looking ahead, Clark saw one of Lewis' men, disguised as an Indian,
+leading a company of Snake warriors that the squaw had recognized as her
+own people, from whom she had been wrested when a child.  The Indians
+broke into songs of delight, and Sacajawea, dashing through the crowd,
+threw her arms round an Indian woman, sobbing and laughing and exhibiting
+all the hysterical delight of a demented creature.  Sacajawea and the
+woman had been playmates in childhood and had been captured in the same
+war; but the Snake woman had escaped, while Sacajawea became a slave and
+married the French guide.
+
+Meanwhile, Captain Clark was being welcomed by Lewis and the chief,
+Cameahwait.  Sacajawea was called to interpret.  Cameahwait rose to
+speak.  The poor squaw flung herself on him with cries of delight.  In
+the chief of the Snakes she had recognized her brother.  Laced coats,
+medals, flags, and trinkets were presented to the Snakes; but though
+willing enough to act as guides, the Indians discouraged the explorers
+about going on in boats.  The western stream was broken for leagues by
+terrible rapids walled in with impassable precipices.  Boats were
+abandoned and horses bought from the Snakes.  The white men set their
+faces northwestward, the southern trail, usually followed by the Snakes,
+leading too much in the direction of the Spanish settlements.  Game grew
+so scarce that by September the men were without food and a colt was
+killed for meat.
+
+By October the company was reduced to a diet of dog; but the last Divide
+had been crossed.  Horses were left with an Indian chief of the
+Flatheads, and the explorers glided down the Clearwater, leading to the
+Columbia, in five canoes and one pilot boat.  Great was the joy in camp
+on November 8, 1805; for the boats had passed the last _portage_ of the
+Columbia.  When heavy fog rose, there burst on the eager gaze of the
+_voyageurs_ the shining expanse of the Pacific.  The shouts of the
+jubilant _voyageurs_ mingled with the roar of ocean breakers.  Like
+Alexander Mackenzie of the far North a decade before, Lewis and Clark had
+reached the long-sought Western Sea.  They had been first up the
+Missouri, first across the middle Rockies, and first down the Columbia to
+the Pacific.
+
+Seven huts, known as Fort Clatsop, were knocked up on the south side of
+the Columbia's harbor for winter quarters; and a wretched winter the
+little fort spent, beleaguered not by hostiles, but by such inclement
+damp that all the men were ill before spring and their very leather suits
+rotted from their backs.  Many a time, coasting the sea, were they
+benighted.  Spreading mats on the sand, they slept in the drenching rain.
+Unused to ocean waters, the inland voyageurs became deadly seasick.
+Once, when all were encamped on the shore, an enormous tidal wave broke
+over the camp with a smashing of log-drift that almost crushed the boats.
+Nez Perces and Flatheads had assisted the white men after the Snake
+guides had turned back.  Clatsops and Chinooks were now their neighbors.
+Christmas and New Year of 1806 were celebrated by a discharge of
+firearms.  No boats chanced to touch at the Columbia during the winter.
+The time was passed laying up store of elk meat and leather; for the
+company was not only starving, but nearly naked.  The Pacific had been
+reached on November 14, 1805.  Fort Clatsop was evacuated on the
+afternoon of March 23, 1806.
+
+The goods left to trade for food and horses when Lewis and Clark departed
+from the coast inland had dwindled to what could have been tied in two
+handkerchiefs; but necessity proved the mother of invention, and the men
+cut the brass buttons from their tattered clothes and vended brass
+trinkets to the Indians.  The medicine-chest was also sacrificed, every
+Indian tribe besieging the two captains for eye-water, fly-blisters, and
+other patent wares.  The poverty of the white man roused the insolence of
+the natives on the return over the mountains.  Rocks were rolled down on
+the boatmen at the worst _portages_ by aggressive Indians; and once, when
+the hungry _voyageurs_ were at a meal of dog meat, an Indian impudently
+flung a live pup straight at Captain Lewis' plate.  In a trice the pup
+was back in the fellow's face; Lewis had seized a weapon; and the
+crestfallen aggressor had taken ignominiously to his heels.  When they
+had crossed the mountains, the forces divided into three parties, two to
+go east by the Yellowstone, one under Lewis by the main Missouri.
+
+Somewhere up the height of land that divides the southern waters of the
+Saskatchewan from the northern waters of the Missouri, the tracks of
+Minnetaree warriors were found.  These were the most murderous raiders of
+the plains.  Over a swell of the prairie Lewis was startled to see a band
+of thirty horses, half of them saddled.  The Indians were plainly on the
+war-path, for no women were in camp; so Lewis took out his flag and
+advanced unfalteringly.  An Indian came forward.  Lewis and the chief
+shook hands, but Lewis now had no presents to pacify hostiles.  Camping
+with the Minnetarees for the night, as if he feared nothing, Lewis
+nevertheless took good care to keep close watch on all movements.  He
+smoked the pipe of peace with them as late as he dared; and when he
+retired to sleep, he had ordered Fields and the other two white men to be
+on guard.  At sunrise the Indians crowded round the fire, where Fields
+had for the moment carelessly laid his rifle.  Simultaneously, the
+warriors dashed at the weapons of the sleeping white men, while other
+Indians made off with the explorers' horses.  With a shout, Fields gave
+the alarm, and pursuing the thieves, grappled with the Indian who had
+stolen his rifle.  In the scuffle the Indian was stabbed to the heart.
+Drewyer succeeded in wresting back his gun, and Lewis dashed out with his
+pistol, shouting for the Indians to leave the horses.  The raiders were
+mounting to go off at full speed.  The white men pursued on foot.  Twelve
+horses fell behind; but just as the Indians dashed for hiding behind a
+cliff, Lewis' strength gave out.  He warned them if they did not stop he
+would shoot.  An Indian turned to fire with one of the stolen weapons,
+and instantly Lewis' pistol rang true.  The fellow rolled to earth
+mortally wounded; but Lewis felt the whiz of a bullet past his own head.
+Having captured more horses than they had lost, the white men at once
+mounted and rode for their lives through river and slough, sixty miles
+without halt; for the Minnetarees would assuredly rally a larger band of
+warriors to their aid.  A pause of an hour to refresh the horses and a
+wilder ride by moonlight put forty more miles between Captain Lewis and
+danger.  At daylight the men were so sore from the mad pace for
+twenty-four hours that they could scarcely stand; but safety depended on
+speed and on they went again till they reached the main Missouri, where
+by singularly good luck some of the other _voyageurs_ had arrived.
+
+[Illustration: On Guard.]
+
+The entire forces were reunited below the Yellowstone on August 12th.
+Traders on the way up the Missouri from St. Louis brought first news of
+the outer world, and the discoverers were not a little amused to learn
+that they had been given up for dead.  At the Mandans, Colter, one of the
+frontiersmen, asked leave to go back to the wilds; and Chaboneau, with
+his dauntless wife, bade the white men farewell.  On September 20th
+settlers on the river bank above St. Louis were surprised to see thirty
+ragged men, with faces bronzed like leather, passing down the river.
+Then some one remembered who these worn _voyageurs_ were, and cheers of
+welcome made the cliffs of the Missouri ring.  On September 23d, at
+midday, the boats drew quietly up to the river front of St. Louis.  Lewis
+and Clark, the greatest pathfinders of the United States, had returned
+from the discovery of a new world as large as half Europe, without losing
+a single man but Sergeant Floyd, who had died from natural causes a few
+months after leaving St. Louis.  What Radisson had begun in 1659-1660,
+what De la Verendrye had attempted when he found the way barred by the
+Rockies--was completed by Lewis and Clark in 1805.  It was the last act
+in that drama of heroes who carved empire out of wilderness; and all
+alike possessed the same hero-qualities--courage and endurance that were
+indomitable, the strength that is generated in life-and-death grapple
+with naked primordial reality, and that reckless daring which defies life
+and death.  Those were hero-days; and they produced hero-types, who flung
+themselves against the impossible--and conquered it.  What they conquered
+we have inherited.  It is the Great Northwest.
+
+[Illustration: Indians of the Up-country or _Pays d'en Haut_.]
+
+
+
+[1] Mention of this man is to be found in Northwest Company manuscripts,
+lately sold in the Masson collection of documents to the Canadian
+Archives and McGill College Library.  It was also my good fortune--while
+this book was going to print--to see the entire family collection of
+Clark's letters, owned by Mrs. Julia Clark Voorhis of New York.  Among
+these letters is one to Chaboneau from Clark.  In spite of the cordial
+relations between the Nor'westers and Lewis and Clark, these fur traders
+cannot conceal their fear that this trip presages the end of the fur
+trade.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+For the very excellent translations of the almost untranslatable
+transcripts taken from the Marine Archives of Paris, and forwarded to
+me by the Canadian Archives, I am indebted to Mr. R. Roy, of the Marine
+Department, Ottawa, the eminent authority on French Canadian
+genealogical matters.
+
+Some of the topics in the Appendices are of such a controversial
+nature--the whereabouts of the Mascoutins, for instance--that at my
+request Mr. Roy made the translation absolutely literal no matter how
+incongruous the wording.  To those who say Radisson was not on the
+Missouri I commend Appendix E, where the tribes of the West are
+described.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN TO M. COMPORTE BY M. CHOUART,
+  AT LONDON, THE 29TH APRIL, 1685
+
+SIR,
+
+I have received the two letters with which you have honored me; I have
+even received one inclosed that I have not given, for reasons that I
+will tell you, God willing, in a few days.
+
+I have received your instructions contained in the one and the other,
+as to the way I should act, and I should not have failed to execute all
+that you order me for the service of our Master, if I had been at full
+liberty so to do; you must have no doubt about it, because my
+inclination and my duty agree perfectly well.  All the advantages that
+I am offered did not for a moment cause me to waver, but, in short,
+sir, I could not go to Paris, and I shall be happy to go and meet you
+by the route you travel.  I shall be well pleased to find landed the
+people you state will be there; in case they may have the commission
+you speak of in your two letters, have it accompanied if you please
+with a memorandum of what I shall have to do for the service of our
+Master.  I know of a case whereby I am sufficiently taught that it is
+not safe to undertake too many things, however advantageous they may
+be, nor undertaking too little.  I am convinced, sir, that having
+orders, I will carry them out at the risk of my life, and I flatter
+myself that you do not doubt it.
+
+There is much likelihood that the men you sent last year are lost.
+
+I should like, sir, to be at the place you desire me to go; be assured
+I will perish, or be there as soon as I possibly can; it is saying
+enough.  I do not answer to the rest of your letter, it is sufficient
+that I am addressing a sensible man, who, knowing my heart, will not
+doubt that I will keep my word with him, as I believe he will do all he
+can for my interests.
+
+I am, with much anxiety to see you, sir, your most humble and most
+obedient servant,
+
+(signed) CHOUART.
+
+I will leave here only on the 25th of next month.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN BY M. CHOUART TO
+  MRS. DES GROSEILLERS, HIS MOTHER
+
+AT LONDON, 11TH APRIL, 1685.
+
+MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,
+
+I learn by the letter you have written me, of the 2nd November last,
+that my father has returned from France without obtaining anything at
+that Court, which made you think of leaving Quebec; my sentiment would
+be that you abandon this idea as I am strongly determined to go and be
+by you at the first opportunity I get, which shall be, God willing, as
+soon as I have taken means to that effect when I have returned from the
+North.
+
+I hope to start on this voyage in a month or six weeks at the latest; I
+cannot determine on what date I could be near you; my father may know
+what difficulties there are.  However, I hope to surmount them, and
+there is nothing I would not do to that end.
+
+The money I left with my cousin is intended to buy you a house, as I
+have had always in mind to do, had not my father opposed it, but now I
+will do it so as to give you a chance to get on, and always see you in
+the country where I will live.
+
+I have been made, here, proposals of marriage, to which I have not
+listened, not being here under the rule of my king nor near my parents,
+and I would have left this kingdom had I been given the liberty to do
+so, but they hold back on me my pay and the price of my merchandise,
+and I cannot sail away as orders have been given to arrest me in case I
+should prepare to leave.
+
+What you fear in reference to my money should not give you any
+uneasiness on account of the English.  I will cause it to be pretty
+well known that I never intended to follow the English.  I have been
+surprised and forced by my uncle's subterfuges to risk this voyage
+being unable to escape the English vessels where my uncle made me go
+without disclosing his plan, which he has worked out in bringing me
+here, but I will not disclose mine either: to abandon this nation.  I
+am willing that my cousin should pay you the income on my money, until
+I return home.  M. the earl of Denonville, your governor, will see to
+my mother's affairs, as they who render service to the country will not
+be forsaken as in the past, and being generous as he is, loyal and
+zealous for his country, he will inform the Court what there is to be
+done for the benefit of our nation.
+
+I am, my dear mother, to my father and to you,
+
+most obedient servant,
+  (signed) CHOUART.
+
+And below is written:--
+
+MOTHER,
+
+I pray you to see on my behalf M. du Lude, and assure him of my very
+humble services.  I will have the honor of seeing him as soon as I can.
+Please do the same with M. Peray and all our good friends.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+COUNCIL
+
+Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, 8th June, 1704.
+
+By the indians Kiskacous, Ottawa, Sinagot of the Sable Nation, Hurons,
+Saulteurs (Sault Indians), Amikoique (Amikoues), Mississaugas,
+Nipissings, Miamis and Wolves, in the presence of M. de
+Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a
+detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at
+the said post; Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the
+Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as
+_voyageurs_.
+
+The one named FORTY SOLS, (40 half-penny), indian chief of the Huron
+nation speaks as much on behalf of the said nation as of all those
+present at the meeting.
+
+The French having come, he said:--
+
+"We ask that all the French be present at this Council so that they
+hear and know what we will say to you.
+
+"We are well on this land, it is very good, and we are much pleased
+with it; listen well, father, we pray you.
+
+"Mrs de Tonty went away last year; she did not return; we see you going
+away to-day, father, with your wife, your children and all the
+Frenchwomen as well as that of M. Radisson, who is going down with you;
+that reveals to us that you abandon us.
+
+"We are angry for good and ill-disposed if the women go away.  We pray
+you to pay attention to this because we could not stop you nor your
+young men: we demand that Radisson remains, or at least, that he
+returns promptly."
+
+
+BY A NECKLACE (Wampum)
+
+"We will escort your wife and the other Frenchwomen who intend to go
+down to Montreal.  Now, mind well what we are asking you.
+
+"We readily see that the Governor is a liar, as he does not keep to
+what he has promised us; as he has lied to us we will lie to him also,
+and we will listen no more to his word.
+
+"What brings that man here (speaking of M. Desnoyers)?  We do not know
+him and do not understand him; we are ill-disposed.  It is two years
+since you have been gathering in our peltries, part of which has been
+taken down; we will allow nothing to leave until the French come up
+with goods."
+
+
+BY ANOTHER NECKLACE
+
+"Father, we pray you to send back that man (speaking of M. Desnoyers),
+because if he remains here, we do not answer for his safety; our people
+have told us that he despises our peltries and only wanted beaver;
+where does he want us to get it.  We absolutely want him to go; nothing
+will leave the house where the trading is done and where the peltries
+and bundles are, until the French arrive here with merchandise and they
+be allowed to trade.  When we came here, the Governor did not tell us
+that the merchants would be masters over the merchandise; he lied to
+us; we ask that all the Frenchmen trade here; we pray you to write and
+tell him what we are saying, and if he does not listen to us, we will
+also refuse to accept his word.
+
+"The land is not yours, it is ours, and we will leave it to go where we
+like without anybody finding fault.  We regret having allowed the
+surgeon to leave as we apprehend he will not come back.
+
+"We pray you will cause to remain Gauvereau the blacksmith and gunsmith.
+
+"I have nothing more to say, I have spoken for all the nations here
+present."
+
+M. de Lamothe had a question put to the Ottawa and the other nations,
+if that was their sentiment; they all answered: Yes, and that they were
+of one and the same mind.  He told them that, seeing they had taken
+time to think over what they had just said, he would consider as to
+what he had to answer them, and, put them off to the morrow, after
+having accepted their necklace.
+
+(Not signed.)
+
+
+COUNCIL
+
+Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, the 9th June, 1704.
+
+By the Indians Kiskacous; Ottawas; Sinagotres, the Sable nation;
+Hurons; Sauteux (Sault Ste Marie Indians); Amikoique (Beaver nation);
+Mississaugas; Miamis and Wolves in the presence of M. de
+Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a
+detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at
+the said post, Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the
+Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as
+_voyageurs_.
+
+M. de Lamothe addressed all the said nations:--
+
+"As you requested me to pay attention to your words, please listen, the
+same, to-day.
+
+"I was aware that Mdme. de Tonty's trip to Montreal last year had given
+you umbrage, because she did not come back; and the cause of it is her
+pregnancy.
+
+"I knew also that my wife's setting out for Montreal as also the other
+Frenchwomen was causing you uneasiness, because you believed I was
+going to abandon you.  It is true she was going away, but it was not
+for ever.  I showed her your necklace; that her children would miss her
+very much and that they begged of her to stay.  When she heard of your
+grief, she accepted your necklace and she will stay for some time,
+because she does not like to refuse her children; the other Frenchwomen
+will remain also.
+
+"You spoke ill of the Governor when you said he was a liar.  If anyone
+told you that he was forsaking you, I will be pleased if you will tell
+me who it is.  As for me I have no knowledge of it.
+
+"M. Desnoyers was present when you offered your necklace, and like me
+he heard your statement.  He told me you were wrong to complain about
+him because he would not take your peltries and that he wanted beaver
+only; you are complaining inopportunely seeing that he has not done any
+trading.  You should tell me who made those reports.  But as you are
+not glad to see him, he has decided to go back, and as I am going down
+to Montreal on good business, he will accompany me, and also M.
+Radisson, because the Governor wants him, and he must obey, and we will
+arrange so that we come back together.
+
+"You have asked me to write down your speech to the Governor.  I will
+be the bearer of it.  I have not the authority to have the French to
+trade here; it is a matter that M. the Governor will settle with M. the
+Intendant.
+
+"The Governor did not lie to you because he did not notify you the
+first year, that the merchants would be masters of the merchandise,
+because it was the King who sent it here then and I could dispose of
+it; since then, an order came from the King in favor of the merchants.
+
+"This land is mine, because I am the first one who lighted a fire
+thereon, and you all took some to light yours.
+
+"I am very glad that you like this land, and that you find it is good.
+
+"It is of no consequence that the surgeon left, because when one goes
+another comes, and the same applies for the gunsmith.
+
+"I have no more to tell you.  Here is some tobacco that you may all
+smoke together, and that it may give you wisdom until I return and the
+Governor sends you his word.  Attend to your mother during my absence,
+and see that she does not want for provisions, for if you do not take
+care of her, on my return I will not give you a drink of brandy.
+
+"M. de Tonty replaces me; I pray you to be on good terms with him."
+
+FORTY SOLS, chief of the Hurons, spoke for all the indians:--
+
+"We remember well, father, of what we said yesterday because you repeat
+it to-day.  We thank you for having listened to us and granted all we
+asked you.  We thank the women for not going away, because their
+remaining is as if you remained.  From to-morrow we will stimulate our
+young men to go after provisions for our mother.
+
+"It is three years ago, when in Montreal at the general meeting our
+chiefs died, the governor told us to have courage, that he was sorry
+for us, that he saw we were very far to come and get goods in Montreal,
+and he invited us to come and settle around you, and that he would send
+us merchandise at the same price as in Montreal.  This worked well for
+two years, but goods rose up too much in price the third year.
+
+"The first year you came, we were very happy, but now we are naked, not
+even having a bad shirt to put on our back.  We would be pleased by the
+establishment of several stores here, because if we were refused in
+one, we could go to another.
+
+"We are very glad of M. Desnoyers' going back because we do not know
+him and we fear some of our young men may be ill-disposed.
+
+"We were under the impression the Governor had sold us to the merchants
+since they are the masters of the commerce.
+
+"It is true that we took of your fire to light ours but we have waited
+two years without anything coming this way so that your land is ours.
+I told the same thing to the Governor last year in Montreal.
+
+"Have courage, father, we will pray God for you during your voyage so
+that you may bring back good news."
+
+(Not signed.)
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+Cie des Indes
+
+(Indies Co'y)
+
+Renders account to the said company of the death of Mr. Radisson,
+receiver at Montreal, of the nomination ad interim of Mr. Gamelin to
+fill the vacancy of receiver, of account to render by Mr. Deplessis,
+heir of Mr. Radisson to reestablish price of summer beaver as before
+ordinance of the 4th January, 1733.
+
+AT QUEBEC, THE 25TH OCTOBER, 1735.
+
+GENTLEMEN,
+
+I have received the letter you did me the honor to send me of the 9th
+March last.
+
+M. Radisson, your receiver at Montreal, died there the 14th of June and
+immediately M. Gamelin, merchant, to whom Messrs La Gorgendiere and
+Daine had given three years ago, had commissioned to look after your
+interests in default or in case of death of M. Radisson, applied to M.
+Michel, my sub-delegate to affix the seals on of all your effects,
+which was done according to the account rendered you by Messrs. La
+Gorgendiere and Daine.
+
+It was necessary to fill the vacancy.  I have appointed temporarily in
+virtue of the authority, you gave, gentlemen, the same M. Gamelin; I
+thought I could not have your interests in better hands, as much for
+his honesty than his intelligence in regulating his sales and his
+receipts.  Independently of the knowledge he has of the different
+qualities of beaver, I have had the honor to speak to you on this
+subject in my preceding letters and to say that the only obstacle I
+find to giving him the office of receiver at Montreal was his quality
+of merchant outfitter for the upper country, which might render him
+suspicious to you because of the returns he gets in beaver.  Although I
+have a pretty good opinion of him to believe his loyalty proof against
+any particular interest, you shall see, gentlemen, by the copy of the
+commission I have given him, which is sent you, that it is on condition
+either directly or indirectly to do no traffic in the upper country,
+and to confine himself either to marine trade or other inland commerce,
+to which he has agreed, but nevertheless has represented to me that
+being engaged as a partner with M. Lamarque, another merchant, for the
+working out of the post named "the Western Sea" and that of the Sioux;
+this partnership only terminating in 1737; that he was looking around
+to sell his share, but, if this thing was impossible requesting me to
+kindly allow him to continue until that term, past which he would cease
+all commerce in the upper country.  I agreed to this arrangement on
+account of his good qualities, and this will not turn to any account of
+consequence; whatever, selection you may make, gentlemen, you will not
+find a better one in this country.
+
+M. de La Gorgendiere having offered me his son to act as clerk to M.
+Gamelin and comptroller in the Montreal office, for the auditing to be
+made, without increasing on that score the expenditure of your
+administration, I have consented on these conditions; M. Gamelin to
+give him 800 livres (shillings) on the commission of one per cent the
+company allow the receiver at Montreal, and M. Daine has assured me he
+was satisfied with his work.
+
+I will not entertain, you, messieurs, with the discussion of the
+account to be rendered by M. Duplessis, M. Radisson's heir, to your
+agent, who claims he owes 5 to 6000 livres.  Those discussions did not
+take place in my presence.
+
+Most of the beaver shipped this year were put up in bundles, and
+shortage in cotton cloth for packing prevented shipment of the whole.
+
+The disturbances which have occurred for some years in the upper
+country have effectively prevented the Indians from hunting; the post
+of the Bay which abounds ordinarily with beaver, produced nothing;
+those of Detroit and Michilimakinac, only furnished very little.
+Happily the post of the Sioux and of the Western Sea produced near to
+100,000 which swelled up the receipt; otherwise it would have been very
+middling.
+
+The party commanded by M. Desnoyelles against the Indians Sakis and
+Foxes was not as successful as expected on account of the desertion and
+retreat of 100 Hurons and Iroquois who left him when at the Kakanons
+(Kiskanons of Michilimakinac?) without his being able to hold them, so
+that this officer found himself after a long tramp at those Indians'
+fort, not only inferior in numbers but also much in want of provisions.
+He was under the necessity of returning after a rather sharp skirmish
+which took place between some of his men and the enemy.  We lost two
+Frenchmen and one of our indians; the Foxes and Sakis lost 21 men,
+either killed, wounded or captured.
+
+If the Sakis come back to the Bay, as they pledged themselves to M.
+Desnoyelles we are in hopes here that peace will again flourish and
+consequently the trade of the upper country.
+
+I have seen, gentlemen, what you were pleased to say as to reduction in
+price on the summer-beaver.  I had been assured by reliable persons
+that this reduction might become very injurious to your commerce.  I
+have learned that some of this kind of beaver were carried to the
+English who pay two livres (shillings) for one and at a higher price
+than you pay over your counters.  It was from what you wrote me in
+1732, that the hatters could make no use of that beaver, that at your
+request I published an ordinance of the 4th January, 1733, reducing the
+price of summer-beaver either green (gras) or dry (sec) to ten pence a
+pound, on condition that it should be burned.  There could be nothing
+suspicious in that.  But since you now deem that that reduction may be
+harmful, as I have also had in mind to invite the indians and even the
+French under this pretence to take the good as well as the bad beaver
+to the English; I will restore the price of the summer-beaver as it was
+before my ordinance.  I will not be at a loss for a cause: it is not in
+your interest to give a lower price.  You run your commerce, gentlemen,
+with too much good faith to give rise to suspicion that you wished for
+a reduction in price to 10 pence for this kind of beaver, and having it
+burned only to procure it yourself at that price and not burn it.
+Besides, the quantity received is too small a matter to deserve
+consideration.
+
+[Sidenote: Beaver hats half worked made in the country.]
+
+M. the marquis de Beauharnois and I have received the orders of the
+King with reference to beaver hats half worked made in Canada.  His
+Majesty has ordered us to break up the workmen's benches and to prevent
+any manufacture of hats.  We have made some representations on this
+subject, to those made to us, namely by a man named ------, hatter, and
+your receiver at Quebec.  It is true that the making of beaver hats
+half worked and other for export to France could turn out of
+consequence in ruining your privilege and the hat establishments in
+France.  These are the only inconveniences, to my mind, to be feared,
+as I do not look upon such, the making of hats for the use of residents
+of the country.  So that we have satisfied ourselves, until further
+orders, to forbid the going, out of the colony, of all kind of hats, as
+you will see by the ordinance we have published together, M. the
+General and I.  If we had been more strict, the three hatters
+established in this colony, who know no other business than their
+trade, the man ------ amongst others, who follow that calling from
+father to son, would have been reduced to begging.
+
+The quantity of hats they will manufacture when export is stopped,
+cannot be of any injury to the manufactures of the kingdom and be but
+of small matter to your commerce.  Moreover, I am aware that these
+hatters employ the worst kind of beaver, which they get very cheap, and
+your stores at Paris are that much rid of them.
+
+[Sidenote: Defects in list of cloth sent.]
+
+The cloths you sent this year are of better quality than the precedding
+shipment.  Messrs La Gorgendiere, Daine and Gamelin have observed on
+defects which happen in the lists; they told me they would inform you.
+
+[Sidenote: Remittance of 300 livres (shillings) to the Baron de
+Longueuil.]
+
+I have the honor to thank you, gentlemen, for the remittance of 300
+livres you were pleased to grant to M. the Baron of Longueuil, on my
+recommendation.
+
+It is very difficult to prevent the Indians going to Chouaguen; the
+brandy that the English give out freely is an invincible attraction.
+
+I have heard, the same as you, that some Frenchmen disguised as Indians
+had been there; if I can discover some one, you may be sure that I will
+deal promptly with them.  You may have heard that the man LENOIR,
+resident of Montreal, having gone to England three years ago without
+leave, I have kept him in prison till he had settled the fine he was
+condemned to pay, and which I transferred to the hospitals.  I add that
+a part of the interest you have in the Indians not going to Chouaguen,
+I have another on account of the trading carried on for the benefit of
+the King at Niagara and at fort Frontenac which that English post has
+ruined.  By all means you may rely on my attention to break up English
+trade.  I fear I may not succeed in this so long as the brandy traffic,
+although moderate, will find adversaries among those who govern
+consciences.
+
+[Sidenote: Foreign trade; Beaver at trade at Labrador.]
+
+I will do my best to prevent the beaver which is traded at Labrador and
+the other posts in the lower part of the River to be smuggled to France
+by ships from Bayonne, St Malo and Marseille.  This will be difficult
+as we cannot have at those posts any inspector.  I will try, however,
+to give an ordinance so as to prevent that, which may intimidate some
+of those who carry on that commerce.
+
+It is true that the commandants of the upper country posts have relaxed
+in the sending of the declarations made or to be made by the
+_voyageurs_ as to the quantity and quality of the bundles of beaver
+they take down to Montreal.  M. the General and I have renewed the
+necessary orders on this subject so that the commandants shall conform
+to them.
+
+[Sidenote: Asks for continuation of gratuity received by Mr. Michel,
+even to increase it.]
+
+M. Michel, my subdelegate at Montreal has received the bounty of 500
+livres you have requested your agent to pay to him; he hopes that you
+will be pleased to have it continued next year.  I have the honor to
+pray you to do so, and even augment it, if possible.  I can assure you,
+gentlemen that he lends himself on all occasions to all that may
+concern your commerce.  As for myself, I am very flattered by the
+opinion you entertain that I have at heart your interests.  I always
+feel a true satisfaction in renewing you these assurances.
+
+I am, respectfully,
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Thanks for the coffee sent.]
+
+GENTLEMEN, M. de La Gorgendiere has delivered to me on your behalf, a
+bale of Moka coffee.  I am very sensible, gentlemen, to this token of
+friendship on your part.
+
+I have the honor to thank you, and to assure you that I am very truly
+and respectfully, etc.
+
+(signed) HOCQUART.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX E
+
+MEMORANDUM RE CANADA
+
+(No locality) 1697
+
+All the discoveries in America were only made step by step and little
+by little, especially those of lands held by the French in that part of
+the North.
+
+It being certain that during the reign of king Francis I, several of
+his subjects, amateurs of shipping and of discoveries, in imitation of
+the Portuguese and the Spaniards, made the voyage, where they found the
+great cod bank.  The quality of birds frequenting this sea where they
+always find food, caused them to heave the lead, and bottom was found
+and the said great bank.
+
+He got an opinion on the nearest lands, and other curious persons
+desired to go farther, and discovered Cape Breton, Virginia and
+Florida.  Some even inhabited and took possession of the divers places,
+abandoned since, through misunderstanding of the commanders and their
+poor skill in knowing how to keep on good terms with the indians of
+those countries, who, good natured all at the beginning, could not
+suffer the rigor with which it was wanted to subjugate them, so that
+after a short occupation, they left to return to Europe.  And since,
+the Spaniards and the English successfully have taken possession of the
+land and all the coasts that the said English have kept until this day
+to much advantage, so that Frenchmen who have returned since have been
+obliged to settle at Cape Breton and Acadia.
+
+About the year 1540, the said Cape Breton was fortified by Jacques
+Carrier, captain of St Malo, who afterward entered the river St.
+Lawrence up to 7 or 8 leagues above Quebec, where desiring to know
+more, the season also being too far advanced he stopped off to winter
+at a small river which bears his name and which forms the boundary of
+M. de Becancourt's land whom he knew; he made sociable a number of
+Indians who came aboard his ship and brought back beaver pretty
+abundantly.
+
+Since, he made another voyage with Saintonge men which did not prevent
+several other ships to go after the said beaver; men from Dieppe,
+Brittany and La Rochelle, some with a passport and others by fraud and
+piracy, especially the latter, the Civil war having carried away
+persons out of dutifulness, the Admiralty and the Marine being then
+held in very little consideration, which lasted a long time.
+
+However, I believe for having heard it said, that the lands after new
+discoveries were given since to M. Chabot or to M. Ventadour, where a
+certain gentleman from Saintonge named M. du Champlain, had very free
+admittance and who may have mingled with those of his country who had
+navigated with Carrier and had given him a longing to see that of which
+he had only heard speak.
+
+He was a proper man for such a scheme; a great courage, wisdom,
+sensible, pious, fair and of great experience; a robust body which
+would render him indefatigable and capable to resist hunger, cold and
+heat.
+
+This gentleman then solicited permission to come to Canada and obtained
+it.  His small estate and his friends supplied him with a medium sized
+vessel for the passage.  This new commandant or governor pitied much
+the Indians and had the satisfaction at his arrival to see that he was
+much feared and loved by them.  He took memoranda through his
+interpreter of their wars, their mode of living and of their interests.
+At that time they were numerous and proud of the great advantages they
+had over the Iroquois, their enemy.  With this information he recrossed
+to France; gave an account of his voyage, and was so charmed with the
+land, the climate and of the good which would result from a permanent
+establishment that he persuaded his wife to accompany him.  His example
+induced missionaries of St. Francois and some parisian families to
+follow him.  He was granted a commission or governor's provisions to
+take his living from the country.
+
+He erected a palissade fort at the place now occupied by the fort St
+Louis of Quebec.
+
+To please the indians he went with them and three Frenchmen only,
+warring in the Iroquois country, which has no doubt given rise to our
+quarrel with this nation.
+
+The Commerce was then in the hands of the Rochelois (?) who supplied
+some provisions to the said M. de Champlain, a man without interest and
+disposed to be content with little.
+
+He returns to France in the interests of the country and took back
+Madam his wife who died in a Ursuline convent, at Saintes, I believe,
+and he at Quebec, after having worked hard there, with little help
+because of the misfortunes of France.
+
+M. the Cardinal of Richelieu have inspired France with confidence by
+the humiliation of the Rochelois (?) wanted to take care of the marine
+and formed at that time, about 1626 or 1627 what was then called the
+"Society of One Hundred," in which joined persons of all
+qualifications, and also merchants from Dieppe and Rouen.  Dieppe was
+then reputed for good navigators and for navigation.
+
+The said M. the Cardinal got granted to the said company the islands of
+St Christophe, newly discovered and all the lands of Canada.  The
+Company composed of divers states did not take long to disjoin, and of
+this great Company several were formed by themselves, the ones
+concerning themselves about the Isles and the others about Canada,
+where they were also divided up in a Company of Miscou, which is an
+island of the Bay in the lower part of the River, where all the Indians
+meet, and a Company of Tadoussac or Quebec.
+
+The Basques, Rochelois, Bretons, and Normans, who during the disorders
+of the war had commenced secretly on the River, crossed their commerce
+much by the continuation of their runs without passport.  Sometimes on
+pretext of cod or whale fishing, notwithstanding the interdiction of
+decrees, the gain made them risk everything, as the two sides of the
+river were all settled and many more came down from inland.
+
+Those Companies for being badly served on account of inexperience and
+through poor economy, as will happen at the beginning of all affairs,
+were put to large expenses.
+
+The English had already seized on Boston abandoned by the French after
+their new discovery; beaver and elk peltry were much sought after and
+at a very high price in Europe; they could be had for a needle, a
+hawk-bell or a tin looking-glass, a marked copper coin.  Our possession
+was there very well-off.  The English who made war to us in France,
+also made it in Canada, and began to take the fleet about Isle Percee,
+as it was ascending to Quebec.
+
+As four or five vessels came every year loaded with goods for the
+Indians, it was at that time quantity of peas, plums, raisins, figs and
+others and provisions for M. de Champlain; a garrison of 15 or 20 men;
+a store in the lower town where the clerks of the Company lived with 10
+or 12 families already used to the country.  This succor failing, much
+hardship was endured in a country which then produced nothing by
+itself, so that the English presenting themselves the next year with
+their fleet, surrender was obligatory; the governor and the Recollets
+crossed over to France and the families were treated honestly enough.
+
+Happily in 1628 or 1629, France made it up with England and the treaty
+gave back Canada to the French, when M. de Champlain, returned and died
+some years later.
+
+Those of the Company of 100, who were persons of dignity and
+consideration, living in Paris, thought fit to leave the care and
+benefits of commerce for Canada with the Rouen and Dieppe merchants,
+with whom joined a few from Paris.  They were charged with the payment
+of the governor's appointments, to furnish him with provisions and
+subsistence and to keep up the garrisons of Quebec and Three-Rivers
+where there was also a post on account of the large number of Indians
+calling; to furnish the things necessary for the war; to pay themselves
+off the product and give account of the surplus to the directors of the
+Company who had an office at Paris.
+
+It has been said that Dieppe and Rouen benefitted and that Paris
+suffered and was disgusted.
+
+To M. de Champlain succeeded M. de Montmagny, very wise and very
+dignified; knight of Malta; relative of M. de Poinsy, who commanded at
+the Island of St Christophe where the said M. de Montmagny died after
+leaving Canada after a sojourn of 14 or 15 years, loved and cherished
+by the French and the natives--we say the French, although the
+complaints made against him by the principals were the cause of his
+sorrow and he resigned voluntarily.
+
+It is to be remarked that all the commerce was done at Rouen to go out
+through Dieppe on the hearsay and the fine connections that the Jesuit
+Fathers who had taken the Recollets' place, took great care to have
+printed and distributed every year.
+
+Canada was in vogue and several families from Normandy and the Perche
+took sail to come and reside in it; there were nobles, the most of them
+poor, we might say, who found out from the first, that M. de Montmagny
+was too disinterested to be willing to consider the change they desired
+for their advantage.  They intrigued against him five or six families
+without the participation of the others, got leave from him to go to
+France to ask for favors and there had one of themselves as governor;
+obtained liberty in the beaver trade, which until then had been
+strictly forbidden to the inhabitants who had been reserved the fruits
+of the country to advance the culture of the land such as pease, Indian
+corn, and wheat bread.  That was the first title of the inhabitants to
+trade with the indians.
+
+To arrive at that end they promised to pay annually 1000 beaver to the
+Paris office for its seignorial right which it did not receive through
+its attention and management of its affairs.
+
+They got permission to form a Board from their principal men, to
+transact with the governor all matters in the country for peace, for
+war, the settlement of accounts of their society or little republic,
+and also sitting on cases concerning interests of private individuals.
+
+It was then that to keep up this sham republic or society, a tax of
+one-fourth was imposed on the export of beaver.
+
+By these means the authority of the Company and its store were ruined
+and the whole was turning to the advantage of those four or six
+families, the others, either poor or slighted by the authority of M.
+D'Ailleboust, their governor.
+
+On this footing it was not hard for them to find large credit at La
+Rochelle, because loans were made in the name of the Community,
+although it consisted only of these four or six families; which from
+their being poor found themselves in large managements enlarged their
+household, ran into expense, that of their vessels and shipments was
+excessive and the wealth derived from the beaver was to pay all.
+
+Their bad management altered their credit and brought them to agree,
+after several years' enjoyment so as not to pay La Rochelle, to take
+their ships to Havre-de-Grace, where, on arrival they sold to Messrs
+Lick and Tabac; this perfidy which they excused because of the large
+interest taken from them, alarmed La Rochelle who complained to Paris,
+and after much pressing a trustee was appointed to give bonds in the
+name of the society for large sums yet due to the city of La Rochelle.
+
+Their vessels all bore off to Normandy; they took on their cargoes
+there in part, and part at La Rochelle, the trade having been allowed
+those two places, because Rouen and Dieppe had several persons on the
+roll of the Company and obligation was due La Rochelle for having
+loaned property.
+
+The governor and the families addressed reproaches to each other, and
+the King being pleased to listen to them, had the kindness to appoint
+from the body of the company persons of first dignity to give attention
+to what was going on in this colony, who were called Commissioners;
+they were Messrs de Morangis, de la Marguerid, Verthamont and Chame,
+and since, Messrs de Lamoignon, de Boucherat and de Lauzon, the latter
+also of the body of the Company offered to pass over to this country to
+arrange the difficulties, and he asked for its government, which was
+accorded him.
+
+He embarked at La Rochelle because of the obligation of the creditors
+of that city to treat him gently; Rouen did not care much.  He was a
+literary man; he made friends with the R. F. Jesuits, and created a new
+council in virtue of the powers he had brought, rebuke the one and the
+other place, even the inhabitants, in forbidding them to barter in what
+was called the limits of Tadoussac, which he bounded for a particular
+lease as a security for his payment and of what has always since been
+called the offices of the country or the state of the 33,000 livres;
+the emoluments of the Councillors, the garrison, the Jesuits, the
+Parish, the Ursulines, the Hote-Dieu, etc.
+
+The pretext given was that the Iroquois having burned and ruined the
+Hurons or Ottawa, the tax of one-fourth did not produce enough to meet
+those demands, and because Tadoussac also was not sufficient to meet
+all the expenditure contemplated to give war to the Iroquois, he it was
+also who began in not paying the thousand weight in beaver owing for
+seignorial right to the Company who was irritated and blamed his
+conduct, and after the lapse of some years his friends write him they
+could not longer shield him he anticipated his recall in returning to
+France, where he has since served as sub-dean of the Council, residing
+at the cloister of Notre-Dame with his son, canon at the said church.
+
+I only saw him two years in Canada where he was hardly liked, by reason
+of the little care he took to keep up his rank, without servant, living
+on pork and peas like an artisan or a peasant.
+
+However, having decided to go back, for a second time he threw open the
+Tadoussac trade, by an order of his Council.
+
+M. de Lamoignon, the first president, got named to replace him, M.
+D'Argenson, young man of 30 to 32 years steady as could be, who
+remained four or five years to the satisfaction of everybody; he kept
+up the Council as it is intended for the security of his emoluments and
+of the garrison, selected twelve of the most notable persons to whom he
+gave the faculty of trading at Tadoussac and all the sureties to be
+wished for the administration and maintenance.
+
+He had the misfortune to fall out with the Jesuit Fathers, and they,
+with messieurs de Mont Royal, of St Sulpice who had sent Mr the abbey
+de Queysac, in the hope of making a bishop of him; the former wishing
+to have one of their nomination presented to the Queen-mother of the
+reigning King, whom God preserve, M. de Laval, to-day elder and first
+bishop, who, very rigid, not only backed the Jesuits against the
+governor in all difficulties but specially in the matter of the liquor
+traffic with the indians.  Although (D'Argenson) a much God-fearing-man
+he had his private opinions, and this offended him; he asked M. de
+Lamoignon for his recall, which was done in 1661, when M. d'Avaugour
+came out.
+
+It was in 1660 that the Office in Paris, at the request of the
+governor, of the Local council and on the advice of Messrs de
+Lamoignon, Chame and other commissioners made an agreement with the
+Rouen merchants to supply the inhabitants with all goods they would
+require with 60% profit on dry goods and 100% on liquors, freight paid.
+
+It was pretended that the country was not safely secured by ships of
+private parties, and that when they arrived alone by unforeseen
+accidents, they happened unexpectedly, to the ruin of the country; as
+well as the beaver fallen to a low price and which was restored only at
+the marriage of the king should keep up.
+
+The creditors then pressing payment of their claims, a decree ordered
+that of the 60%, 10% should be taken for the payment of debts which
+were fixed at 10,000 livres at the rate of the consumption of the time
+and of which the Company of Normandy took charge.  The country was
+favorable enough to this treaty because they were well served, but when
+the treaty arrived at first, the bishop who was jealous because he had
+not been consulted and that some little gratification had been given to
+facilitate matters had it opposed by some of the inhabitants and by M.
+D'Avaugour, governor in the place of the said D'Argenson.
+
+The Society of Normandy consented to the breaking off of the treaty on
+receiving a minute account and being paid some compensation, as to
+which they had no satisfaction because of the changes, for M.
+D'Avaugour, like the others, fell out with the Bishop who went to
+France and had him revoked, presenting in his stead M. de Mezy, a
+Norman gentleman who did nothing better than to overdo all the
+difficulties arising on the question of the Bishop and the Governor's
+powers.
+
+The beaver dropped down, as soon, to a low price, and there was a
+difference by half when the King in 1664 formed the Company of the West
+Indies, which alone, to the exclusion of all others, had to supply the
+country with merchandise and receive also all the beaver; in 1669, came
+M. de Tracy, de Courcelles and Talon; the latter did not want any
+Company and employed all kinds of ways to ruin the one he found
+established.  He gave to understand to M. Colbert that this country was
+too big to be bounded; that there should come out of it fleets and
+armies; his plans appeared too broad, still he met with no
+contradiction at first, on the contrary he was lauded, which moved him
+to establish a large trade and put out that of the company, which
+through bad success in its affairs at the Isles, was relaxing enough of
+itself in all sorts of undertakings.
+
+M. Talon desiring to bring together the government and the
+superintendence was spending on a large scale to make friends and
+therefore there was not a merchant when the Company quit who could
+transact any business in his presence; he gets his goods free of dues,
+freight and insurance; he also refused to pay the import tax on his
+wines, liquors and tobacco.
+
+Finally his friends or enemies told him aloud that it was of profits of
+his commerce that the King would be enriched.
+
+They fell out, M. de Courcelles and he; their misunderstanding forced
+the first to ask for his discharge.  M. de Frontenac, who succeeded him
+also complained and I believe he returned to France without his conge
+whence he never came back although he had promised so to all his
+friends.
+
+You are aware as well as and perhaps better than I of the disputes of
+M. de Frontenac and M. du Chesneau.
+
+And that is all I have been told for my satisfaction of what occurred
+previous to 1655 when I came here to attend to the affairs of the Rouen
+Company.
+
+I have also learned at the time of my arrival that properly speaking,
+though there were a very large number of Indians, known under divers
+names, which they bear with reference to certain action that their
+chiefs had performed or with reference to lakes, rivers, lands or
+mountains which they inhabit, or sometimes to animals stocking their
+rivers and forests, nevertheless they could all be comprised under two
+mother languages, to wit: the Huron and the Algonquin.
+
+At that period, I was told, the Huron was the most spread over men and
+territory, and at present, I believe, that the Algonquin can well be
+compared to it.
+
+To note, that all the Indians of the Algonquin language are stationed
+and occupy land that we call land of the North on account of the River
+which divides the country into two parts, and where they all live by
+fishing and hunting.
+
+As well as the Indians of the Huron language who inhabit land to the
+South, where they till the land and winter wheat, horse-beans, pease,
+and other similar seeds to subsist; they are sedentary and the
+Algonquin follow fish and game.
+
+However, this nation has always passed for the noblest, proudest and
+hardest to manage when prosperous.  When the French came here the true
+Algonquin owned land from Tadoussac to Quebec, and I have always
+thought they were issued from the Saguenay.  It was a tradition that
+they had expelled the Iroquois from the said place of Quebec and
+neighborhood where they once lived; we were shown the sites of their
+villages and towns covered by trees of a fresh growth, and now that the
+lands are of value through cultivation, the farmers find thereon tools,
+axes and knives as they were used to make them.
+
+We must believe that the said Algonquin were really masters over the
+said Iroquois, because they obliged them to move away so far.
+
+Nobody could tell me anything certain about the origin of their war but
+it was of a more cruel nature between these two nations than between
+the said Iroquois and Hurons, who have the same language or nearly so.
+
+It is only known that the Iroquois commenced first to burn, importuned
+by their enemies who came to break their heads whilst at work in their
+wilderness; they imagined that such cruel treatment would give them
+relaxation, and since, all the nations of this continent have used
+fire, with the exception of the Abenakis and other tribes of Virginia.
+
+These Iroquois having had the best of the fight and reduced the
+Algonquins since our discovery of this country, principally because
+their pride giving us apprehension about their large number, they would
+not arm themselves until a long time after the Dutch had armed the
+Iroquois, made war and ruined all the other nations who were not nearly
+so warlike as the Algonquin, and after the war, diseases came on that
+killed those remaining; some have scattered in the woods, but in
+comparison to what I have seen on my arrival, one might say that there
+are no more men in this country outside of the fastnesses of the
+forests recently discovered.
+
+The Hurons before their defeat by the Iroquois had, through the hope of
+their conversion obliged the Jesuits to establish with them a strong
+mission, and as from time to time it was necessary to carry to them
+necessities of life, the governors began to allow some of their
+servants to run up there every three or four years, from where they
+brought that good green (gras) Huron beaver that the hatters seek for
+so much.
+
+Sometimes this was kept up; sometimes no one offered for the voyage
+there being then so little greediness it is true that the Iroquois were
+so feared; M. de Lauson was the only one to send two individuals in
+1656 who each secured 14 to 15,000 livres and came back with an indian
+fleet worth 100,000 crowns.  However, M. D'Argenson who succeeded him
+and was five years in the country sent nobody neither did Messrs
+Avaugour and de Mezy.
+
+It was consequently after the arrival of M. Talon that under pretext of
+discovery, and of finding copper mines, he alone became director of
+those voyages, for he obliged M. de Courcelles to sign him conges which
+he got worked, but on a dispute between the workers he handled some
+himself, of which I remember.
+
+You know the number and the regulations given under the first
+administration of M. the Earl of Frontenac.
+
+It is certain that it is the holders of conges who look after and bring
+down the beaver, and, can it be said that it is wrong to have an
+abundance of goods.
+
+The French and the Indians have come down this year; the receipts of
+the office must total up 200 millions or thereabouts, which judging
+from your letter, will surprise those gentlemen very much.  The clerks
+have rejected it as much as they liked; I am told that they admitted
+somewhere about six thousands of muscovy; during our administration
+there were 28 or 30 thousands received, which is a large difference
+without taking into account other qualities, and all this does not give
+the French much trouble, and at the most for the year we were not
+informed.  I have given my sentiments to the meeting, and in particular
+to M. de Frontenac and to M. de Champigny.
+
+We should be agreeable to our Prince's wishes who is doing so much good
+to this country: his tenants who must supply him in such troubled
+times, lose, and it is proper that people in Canada contribute
+something to compensate them by freely agreeing to a pretty rich
+receipt on their commodity but what resource in regard to the indian so
+interested that everything moves with him, through necessity; they are
+asked and sought after to receive English goods, infinitely better than
+ours, at a cost half as low and to pay their beaver very high.
+
+This commercial communication gives them peace with their enemies and
+liberty to hunt, and consequently to live in abundance instead of their
+living at present with great hardship.  Should we not say that it
+requires a great affection not to break away in the face of such strong
+attractions; if we lose them once we lose them for ever, that it is
+certain, and from friends they become our enemies; thus we lose not
+only the beaver but the colony, and absolutely no more cattle, no more
+grains, no more fishing.
+
+The colony with all the forces of the Kingdom cannot resist the Indians
+when they have the English or other Europeans to supply them with
+ammunitions of war, which leads me to the query: what is the beaver
+worth to the English that they seek to get it by all means?
+
+If also the rumors set agoing are true the farmers-general would not
+sell a considerable part to the Danes at a very high price, should they
+not have had somebody in their employ who understands and knows that
+article well, it appears to me that the thing is worth while.
+
+All the same, people are asking why they want to sell so dear, what
+costs them so little, for taking one and the other, that going out this
+year should not cost them more than 50s (_sous_), the entries,
+Tadoussac, and the tax of one fourth, does it not pay the lease with
+profit.  This is in everybody's mind, and everyone looks at it as he
+fancies.
+
+I was of opinion to arrange the receipts on a basis that these
+gentlemen got M. Benac to offer, so as to avoid the difficulties on the
+qualities, and this opinion served to examine the loss this proposition
+would bring to the country in the general receipt.
+
+I have no other interest than the Prince's service, and to please these
+gentlemen I should like to know, heartily, of some expedient, because
+it is absolutely necessary to find one to satisfy the Indian; M. the
+Earl of Frontenac is under a delusion: I may say it, they will give us
+the goby, and after that all shall be lost, I am not sure even, if they
+would not repeat the Sicilian Vespers, to show their good will, and
+that they never want to make it up.  I am so isolated that I do not say
+anything about it, as I am afraid for myself, but I know well that it
+is Indian's nature to betray, and that our affairs are not at all good
+in the upper country.
+
+To a great evil great remedy.  I had said to M. de Frontenac that the
+25 per cent could be abolished and make it up on something else, as it
+is a question of saving the country, but he did not deem fit of
+anything being said about it.
+
+I also told him and M. de Champigny that we might treat with a Dutchman
+to bring on a clearance English and Dutch goods which are much thought
+of by our indians for their good quality and their price, that this
+vessel would not go up the river but stay below at a stated place,
+where we could go for his goods, and give him beaver for his rightful
+lading.
+
+The company should have the control of these merchandise, so as to sell
+them to the indians on the base of a tariff, so as to prevent the
+greediness of the _voyageurs_ which contributes very much to the
+discontent of the natives, because at first the French only went to the
+Hurons and since to Michilimakinac where they sold to the Indians of
+the locality, who then went to exchange with other indians in distant
+woods, lands and rivers, but now the said Frenchmen holding permits to
+have a larger gain pass over all the Ottawas and Indians of
+Michilimakinac to go themselves and find the most distant tribes which
+displeased the former very much.
+
+This has led to fine discoveries and four or five hundred young men of
+Canada's best men are employed at this business.
+
+Through them we have become acquainted with several Indian's names we
+knew not, and 4 and 500 leagues farther away, there are other indians
+unknown to us.
+
+Down the Gulf in French Acadia, we have always known the Abenakis and
+Micmacs.
+
+On the north shore of the River, from Seven islands up we have always
+known the Papinachois, Montagnais, Poissons Blancs, (White Fish),
+(these being in what is called limits of Tadoussac), Mistassinis,
+Algonquins.
+
+
+AT QUEBEC
+
+There are Hurons, remains of the ancient Hurons, defeated by the
+Iroquois, in Lake Huron.
+
+There is also south of the Chaudiere (River), five leagues from Quebec,
+a large village of Christian Abenakis.
+
+The Hurons & Abenakis are under the Jesuit Fathers.
+
+These Hurons have staid at Quebec so as to pray God more conveniently
+and without fear of the Iroquois.
+
+The Abenakis pray God with more fervor than any Indians of these
+countries.  I have seen and been twice with them when warring; they
+must have faith to believe as they do and their exactitude to live well
+according to principles of our religion.  Blessed be God!  They are
+very good men at war and those who have give and still give so much
+trouble to the Bostoners.
+
+
+AT THREE-RIVERS
+
+Wolves and Algonquins both sides of the river.
+
+
+AT MONTROYAL OR VILLE-MARIE
+
+There are Iroquois of the five nations who have left their home to pray
+(everyone is free to believe) but it is certain that threefourths have
+no other motive nor interest to stay with us than to pray.
+
+There are, then, Senecas, Mohawks, Cayugas, Wyandotts, Oneida partly on
+the mountain of Mont-Royal under the direction of Messrs of St Sulpice,
+and partly at the Sault (Recollet) south side, that is to say, above
+the rapids, under the R. F. Jesuits, whose mission is larger than St
+Sulpice's.
+
+150 leagues from Mont Royal the Grand River leading to the Ottawas; to
+the north are the Temiscamingues, Abitiby, Outanloubys, who speak
+Algonquin.
+
+At lake Nepissing, the Nipissiniens, Algonquin language, always going
+up the Grand River.
+
+In lake Huron, 200 leagues from Montreal, the Mississagues and
+Amikoues: Algonquins.
+
+At Michilimackinac, the Negoaschendaching or people of the Sable,
+Ottawas, Linage Kikacons or Cut Tail, the men from Forked Lake
+Onnasaccoctois, the Hurons, in all 1000 men or thereabouts half Huron
+and half Algonquin language.
+
+In the Michigan or lake Illinois, north side, the Noquets, Algonquins,
+Malomini (Menomeenee), or men of the Folle-Avoine: different language.
+
+
+SOUTH OF PUANTS (GREEN) BAY
+
+The Wanebagoes otherwise Puans, because of the name of the Bay;
+language different from the two others.
+
+The Sakis, 3 leagues from the Bay, and Pottewatamis, about 200 warriors.
+
+Towards lake Illinois, on River St Joseph, the Miamis or men of the
+Crane who have three different languages, though they live together.
+United they would form about 600 men.
+
+Above the Bay, on Fox river, the Ottagamis, the Mascoutins and the
+Kicapoos: all together 1200 men.
+
+At Maramegue river where is situated Nicholas Perrot's post, are some
+more Miamis numbering five to six hundred; always the same language.
+
+The Illinois midway on the Illinois river making 5 to 6 different
+villages, making in all 2000 men.
+
+We traffic with all these nations who are all at war with the Iroquois.
+In the lower Missipy there are several other nations very numerous with
+whom we have no commerce and who are trading yet with nobody.
+
+Above Missoury river which is of the Mississippi below the river
+Illinois, to the south, there are the Mascoutins Nadoessioux, with whom
+we trade, and who are numerous.
+
+Sixty leagues above the missisipi and St Anthony of Padua Fall, there
+is lake Issaquy otherwise lake of Buade, where there are 23 villages of
+Sioux Nadoessioux who are called Issaquy, and beyond lake Oettatous,
+lower down the auctoustous, who are Sioux, and could muster together
+4000 warriors.  Because of their remoteness they only know the Iroquois
+from what they heard the French say.
+
+In lake Superior, south side are the saulteurs who are called Ouchijoe
+(objibway), Macomili, Ouxcinacomigo, Mixmac and living at Chagoumigon,
+it is the name of the country, the Malanas or men of the Cat-fish; 60
+men; always the Algonquin language.
+
+Michipicoten, name of the land; the Machacoutiby and Opendachiliny,
+otherwise Dung-heads; lands' men; algonquin language.  The Picy is the
+name of a land of men, way inland, who come to trade.
+
+Bagoasche, also name of a place of men of same nation who come also to
+trade 200 and 300 men.
+
+Osepisagny river being discharge of lake Asemipigon; sometimes the
+indians of the lake come to trade; they are called Kristinos and the
+nation of the Great Rat.  These men are Algonquins, numbering more than
+2000, and also go to trade with the English of the north.
+
+There are too the Chichigoe who come sometimes to us, sometimes north
+to the English.
+
+Towards West-Northwest, it is nations called Fir-trees; numerous; all
+their traffic is with the English.
+
+All those north nations are rovers, as was said, living on fish and
+game or wild-oats which is abundant on the shores of their lakes and
+rivers.
+
+In lake Ontario, south side, the five Iroquois nations; our enemies;
+about 1200 warriors live on indian corn and by hunting.
+
+We can say, that, of all the Indians they are the most cruel during
+war, as during peace they are the most humane, hospitable, and
+sociable; they are sensible at their meetings, and their behaviour
+resembles much to the manners of republics of Europe.
+
+Lake Ontario has 200 leagues in circumference.
+
+Lake Erie above Niagara 250 leagues; lakes Huron and Michigan joined
+552 leagues: to have access to these three lakes by boat, there is only
+the portage of Niagara, of two leagues, above the said lake Ontario.
+
+All those who have been through those lakes say they are terrestrial
+paradises for abundance of venison, game, fishing, and good quality of
+the land.
+
+From the said lakes to go to lake Superior there is only one portage of
+15 (?).  The said lake is 500 leagues long in a straight line, from
+point to point, without going around coves nor the bays of Michipicoten
+and Kaministiquia.
+
+To go from lake Superior to lake Asemipigon there is only 15 leagues to
+travel, in which happen seven portages averaging 3 good leagues; the
+said lake has a circumference of 280 leagues.
+
+From lake Huron to lake Nipissing there is the river called French
+River, 25 leagues long; there are 3 portages; the said lake has 60 to
+80 leagues of circumference.
+
+Lake Assiniboel is larger than lake Superior, and an infinity of
+others, lesser and greater have to be discovered, for which I approve
+of M. the Marquis of Denonville's saying, often repeated:--that the
+King of France, our monarch was not high lord enough to open up such a
+vast country, as we are only beginning to enter on the confines of the
+immensity of such a great country.
+
+The road to enter it is by the Grand River and lake Ontario by Niagara,
+which should be easy in peaceful times in establishing families at
+Niagara for the portage, and building boats on Lake Erie.  I did not
+find that a difficult thing, and I want to do it under M. the Marquis
+of Denonville, who did not care, so soon as he perceived that his war
+expedition had not succeeded.
+
+I have given you in this memorandum the names of the natives known to
+us and with whom our wood rovers (coureurs de bois) have traded; my
+information comes from some of the most experienced.
+
+The surplus of the memorandum will serve to inform you that prior to M.
+de Tracy, de Courcelle and Talon's arrival, nothing was regulated but
+by the governor's will, although there was a Board; as they were his
+appointments and that by appearances, only his creatures got in, he was
+the absolute master of it and which was the cause that the Colony and
+the inhabitants suffered very much at the beginning.
+
+M. de Tracy on his arrival by virtue of his commission dismissed the
+Board and the Councillors, to appoint another one with members chosen
+by himself and the Bishop, which existed until the 2nd and 3rd year of
+M. de Frontenac's reign, who had them granted at Court, provisions by a
+decree for the establishment of the Council.
+
+It is only from that time that the King having given the country over
+to the gentlemen of the Co'y of West Indies, the tax of one fourth and
+the Tadoussac trade were looked upon as belonging to the Company, and
+since to the King, because M. Talon, who crippled as much as he could,
+this company dare not touch to these two items of the Domain, of which
+the enjoyment remained to them until cessation of their lease.
+
+So, it was in favor of this company that all the regulations were
+granted in reference to the limits and working out of Tadoussac as well
+as to prevent cheating on the beaver tax.
+
+Tadoussac is leased to six gentlemen for the sum of ---- yearly; I took
+shares for one fourth, as it was an occasion to dispose of some goods
+and a profit to everyone of at most 20 ---- yearly.
+
+About beavers there is no fraud to be feared, everybody preferring to
+get letters of exchange to avoid the great difficulties on going out,
+the entry and sale in France, and of large premiums for the risks; in a
+word, no one defrauds nor thinks of it.  The office is not large enough
+to receive all the beaver.
+
+The ships came in very late; I could not get M. Dumenu the secretary to
+the Board to send you the regulations you ask for the beaver trade; you
+shall have them, next year, if it pleases God.  They contain
+prohibition to embark from France under a penalty of 3000 livres' fine,
+confiscation of the goods, even of the ships; however, under the treaty
+of Normandy, I had a Dieppe captain seized for about 200 crowns worth
+of beaver, and the Council here confiscated the vessel, and imposed a
+fine of 1500 livres, on which the captain appealed to France, and he
+obtained at the King's Council, replevin on his ship and the fine was
+reduced to 30 livres.
+
+As prior to M. Talon nobody sent traders in the woods as explained in
+this memorandum there was not to my knowledge any regulation as to the
+said woods before the decree of 1675.  On the contrary I remember that
+those two individuals under M. de Lauzon's government who brought in
+each for 14. or 15,000 livres applied to me to be exempted from the tax
+of one fourth, because, they said we were obliged to them for having
+brought down a fleet which enriched the country.
+
+(Not signed.)
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+[Transcriber's note: Many index entries contain references like the "9
+n." in the "Arms" entry.  The "n." appears to refer to the footnote(s)
+that were on their host pages in the original book.  In this e-book,
+all footnotes have been moved to the end of their respective chapters.]
+
+
+A
+
+Abenaki Indians, the, 363.
+
+Abitiby Indians, the, 364.
+
+Acadia, Indian tribes located in, 363.
+
+Albanel, Charles, Jesuit missionary, 141; overland trip of, to Hudson
+Bay, 143-146; at King Charles Fort, 147.
+
+Albany (Orange), 32; Iroquois freebooting expedition against, 36-38;
+Radisson's escape to, 39-41.
+
+Algonquin Indian, murder of Mohawk hunters by a, 20.
+
+Algonquin Indians, Radisson and Groseillers travel to the West with,
+73-79; territory of the, 359; wars with the Iroquois, 359-360; tribes
+of, on Lake Huron, 364.
+
+Allemand, Pierre, companion of Radisson, 154.
+
+Allouez, Pere Claude, 142.
+
+Amsterdam, Radisson's early visit to, 42.
+
+Arctic Ocean, Hearne's overland trip to, 257-265; arrival at, 265-266;
+Mackenzie's trip of exploration to, 281-286.
+
+Arms, supplied to Mohawks by Dutch, 9 n.; desire for, cause of Sioux'
+friendliness to Radisson, 120, 122.
+
+Assiniboine Indians, origin of name, 10 n., 85; Radisson learns of,
+from prairie tribes, 85; defence of the younger Groseillers by, 184; De
+la Verendrye meets the, 218-221; accompany De la Verendrye to the
+Mandans, 223-227; Saint-Pierre's encounter with, 237.
+
+Assiniboine River, 218, 219, 221-222.
+
+Athabasca country, Hearne explores the, 268-269.
+
+Athabasca Lake; Hearne's arrival at, 268-269.
+
+Athabasca River, 277.
+
+Athabascan tribes, Matonabbee and the, 249.
+
+Aulneau, Father, 210, 211; killed by Indians, 214.
+
+
+B
+
+Baptism of Indian children by Radisson and Groseillers, 92.
+
+Barren lands, region of "Little Sticks," 253-254, 259-260.
+
+Bath of purification, Indian, 14, 268.
+
+Bay of the North.  _See_ Hudson Bay.
+
+Bayly, Charles, governor of Hudson's Bay Company, 140; in Canada,
+140-142; encounter with the Jesuit Albanel, 141-142, 147; accusations
+against Radisson and Groseillers, 147-148.
+
+Bear, Lewis's experience with a, 318.
+
+Beauharnois, Charles de, governor of New France, 201, 203, 235.
+
+_Beaux Hommes_, Crow Indians, 232.
+
+Beckworth, prisoner among Missouri Indians, 33.
+
+Belmont, Abbe, cited, 5 n., 98 n.
+
+Bering, Vitus, 195.
+
+Bigot, intendant of New France, 236.
+
+Bird, prisoner of the Blackfeet, 33.
+
+Bird's egg moon, the (June), 279.
+
+Blackbird, Omaha chief, grave of, 311.
+
+Bochart, governor of Three Rivers.  _See_ Duplessis-Kerbodot.
+
+Boesme, Louis, 70.
+
+_Boissons_, drinking matches, 280.
+
+Boston, Radisson and Groseillers in, 136.
+
+Bourassa, _voyageur_, 213.
+
+Bourdon, Jean, explorations by, 102, 134 n.
+
+Bow Indians, the, 232-233.
+
+Bridgar, John, governor of Hudson's Bay Company, 166, 169, 171, 173,
+174, 175, 180.
+
+Brower, J. V., cited, 88 n.
+
+Bryce, Dr. George, 6 n., 88 n., 187 n.
+
+Buffalo-hunts, Sioux, 92 n., 124.
+
+Button, Sir Thomas, explorations of, 134 n.
+
+
+C
+
+Cadieux, exploit and death of, 197-198.
+
+Cameahwait, Snake Indian chief, 324-326.
+
+Cannibalism among Indians, 24, 77.
+
+Cannibals of the Barren Lands, 255.
+
+Cape Breton, discovery and fortification of, 350.
+
+Caribou, Radisson's remarks on, 127.
+
+Caribou herds in Barren Lands, 255; Indian method of hunting, 259.
+
+Carr, George, letter from, to Lord Darlington, 136 n.
+
+Carr, Sir Robert, urges Radisson to renounce France, 136.
+
+Carrier, Jacques, 71, 193, 350-351.
+
+Cartwright, Sir George, Radisson and Groseillers sail with, 136-137;
+shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+
+Catlin, cited, 14 n., 226.
+
+Cayuga Indians, the, 34, 55, 364.
+
+Chaboneau, guide to Lewis and Clark, 312, 326, 332.
+
+Chame, M., commissioner of Company of Normandy, 355, 357.
+
+Champlain, governor in Canada, 351-353.
+
+Charlevoix, mission of, 202.
+
+Chichigoe tribe of Indians, the, 365.
+
+Chinook Indians, Lewis and Clark friends with, 328.
+
+Chipewyans, bath of purification practised by, 14 n.; Hearne's journey
+with, 257-263; massacre of Eskimo by, 263-265.
+
+Chouart, M., letters of, 335-337.  _See_ Groseillers, Jean Baptiste.
+
+Chouart, Medard.   See Groseillers, Medard Chouart.
+
+_Chronique Trifluvienne_, Sulte's, 4 n.
+
+Clark, William, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 308-309; exploration of
+Yellowstone River by, 329; hero-qualities of, 332-333.  _See_ Lewis.
+
+Clatsop Indians, Lewis and Clark among the, 328.
+
+Clearwater River, Lewis and Clark on the, 327.
+
+Coal, use of, by Indians, 89.
+
+Colbert, Radisson pardoned and commissioned by, 148; withholds
+advancement from Radisson, 152; summons Radisson and Groseillers to
+France, 176-177; death of, 177.
+
+Colleton, Sir Peter, shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+
+Colter, frontiersman with Lewis and Clark, 332.
+
+Columbia River, Lewis and Clark travel down the, 327.
+
+Company of Miscou, the, 352.
+
+Company of Normandy, the, 354-357.
+
+Company of the North, the, 151, 154, 175, 176.
+
+Company of One Hundred Associates, the, 133, 352, 353.
+
+Company of Tadoussac, the, 352.
+
+Company of the West Indies, the, 133, 153; account of formation of, 357.
+
+Comporte, M., letter to, from M. Chouart, 335-336.
+
+Coppermine River ("Far-Off-Metal River"), 245, 249, 252, 262, 267.
+
+Copper mines, Radisson receives reports of, 112, 124; discovery of, by
+Hearne, 267.
+
+Council Bluffs, origin of name, 311.
+
+Council pipe, smoking the, 16, 29.
+
+Couture, explorations of, 103, 129-130.
+
+Couture (the younger), 143.
+
+Cree Indians, first reports of, 69, 85; Radisson's second visit to,
+112-113, 116; wintering in a settlement of, 117; a famine among,
+118-119; De la Verendrye assisted by, 206-208.
+
+Crow Indians, De la Verendrye's sons among, 232-233.
+
+
+D
+
+Dablon, Claude, Jesuit missionary, 103, 134 n., 142.
+
+D'Ailleboust, M., governor of Company of Normandy, 354.
+
+Dakota, Radisson's explorations in, 89.
+
+D'Argenson, Viscomte, governor of New France, 99, 129-130, 356-357, 360.
+
+D'Avaugour, governor, 104, 105, 107, 133, 143, 357, 360.
+
+Death-song, Huron, 24, 54.
+
+De Casson, Dollier, cited, 5 n., 96 n., 98 n.
+
+De la Galissonniere, governor, 235.
+
+De la Jonquiere, governor, 236.
+
+De Lanoue, fur-trade pioneer, 204.
+
+De la Verendrye, Francois, 215, 222, 229, 230, 233.
+
+De la Verendrye, Jean Baptiste, 197, 205, 208-209, 210, 212; murder of,
+by Sioux, 214.
+
+De la Verendrye, Louis, 215, 229.
+
+De la Verendrye, Pierre, 215, 222, 229, 230, 235, 315.
+
+De la Verendrye, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, leaves Montreal on search
+for Western Sea (1731), 194-197; at Nepigon, 201; previous career,
+201-203; traverses Lake Superior to Kaministiquia, 204; Fort St. Pierre
+named for, 206; among the Cree Indians, 206-208; return to Quebec to
+raise supplies, 210; loss of eldest son in Sioux massacre, 214;
+explores Minnesota and Manitoba to Lake Winnipeg, 215-216; at Fort
+Maurepas, 217; return to Montreal with furs, 218; explores valley of
+the Assiniboine, 219-221; visits the Mandan Indians, 224-225; takes
+possession for France of the Upper Missouri, 225; superseded by De
+Noyelles (1746), 235; decorated with Order of Cross of St. Louis, 235;
+death at Montreal, 236.
+
+De Niverville, lieutenant of Saint-Pierre, 236-237.
+
+Denonville, Marquis of, 336, 366, 367.
+
+De Noyelles, supersession of De la Verendrye by, 235.
+
+De Noyon, explorations of, 204.
+
+Dieppe, merchants of, interested in Canada trade, 352, 353.
+
+Dionne, Dr. N. E., cited, 76 n., 88 n., 106 n., 139 n.
+
+Dog Rib Indians, Mackenzie among, 283-284.
+
+Dollard, fight of, against the Iroquois, 96-98, 198.
+
+Dreuillettes, Gabriel, discoveries by, 70-71, 103, 134 n.
+
+Drewyer, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 331.
+
+Drugging of Indians, 63-64.
+
+Duchesnau, M. Jacques, 149 n., 358.
+
+Dufrost, Christopher, Sieur de la Jemmeraie, 197, 203, 205, 209, 210,
+211.
+
+Du Peron, Francois, 47.
+
+Duplessis-Kerbodot, murder of, by Iroquois, 5 n., 19, 45.
+
+Dupuis, Major, at Onondaga, 46, 55-66.
+
+Dutch, arms supplied to Mohawk Indians by, 9 n.; war of, with the
+English, 137-138.
+
+
+E
+
+England, arrival of Radisson and Groseillers in, 137; effect of war
+between Holland and, on exploring propositions, 137-138; Hudson's Bay
+Company organized in, 139-140; fur-trading expeditions from, 140-149.
+_See_ Hudson's Bay Company _and_ Radisson.
+
+Erie Indians, the, 34.
+
+Eskimo, massacre of, by Chipewyans, 263-265.
+
+
+F
+
+"Far-Off-Metal River," the, 245, 249, 252; Hearne reaches the, 262.
+
+Feasts, Indian, 60, 62-63, 67 n.
+
+_Festins a tout manger_, 60, 67 n.
+
+Fields, companion of Meriwether Lewis, 330-331.
+
+Flathead Indians, assistance given Lewis and Clark by, 327, 328.
+
+Floyd, Sergeant, of Lewis and Clark's expedition, 332.
+
+Forked River, term applied to Mississippi and Missouri rivers, 86, 100;
+Radisson's account of people on the, 86-87.
+
+Fort, Dollard's so-called, at the Long Sault, 97; Radisson and
+Groseillers', in the Northwest, 114-115.
+
+Fort Bourbon (Port Royal), on Hayes River, 161-175, 182-186.
+
+Fort Bourbon, on Saskatchewan, 229.
+
+Fort Chipewyan, 277.
+
+Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark's winter quarters, 327-328.
+
+Fort Dauphin, 229.
+
+Fort King Charles, 139, 146.
+
+Fort Lajonquiere, 237.
+
+Fort Mandan, stars and stripes hoisted at, 312.
+
+Fort Maurepas, construction, 209; description, 216-217; De la Verendrye
+at, 217.
+
+Fort Orange, Radisson and the Iroquois at, 36-38; Radisson's escape to,
+39-41.
+
+Fort Poskoyac, 229, 235.
+
+Fort Prince of Wales, building of, 243; description, 244-245; Hearne
+becomes governor of, 270; surrender and destruction of, 271-272.
+
+Fort de la Reine, construction of, 222; De la Verendrye returns to,
+after visiting Mandans, 228; abandonment of, 237.
+
+Fort Rouge, 221.
+
+Fort St. Charles, 208-209, 210, 215.
+
+Fort St. Louis, of Quebec, first fortification on site of, 351.
+
+Fort St. Pierre, 206.
+
+Fort William, 280, 283, 287.
+
+Fraser River, Mackenzie's explorations on, 294-302.
+
+Frog moon, the (May), 279.
+
+Frontenac, governor of New France, 154, 358, 360, 361, 362, 367.
+
+Fur companies of New France, 130, 133, 151, 153, 175-176, 352-358.
+
+Fur company, Hudson's Bay.  _See_ Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+Fur trade, the French, 101-102, 104; regulations governing the, 104,
+153 n.; effect of, on development of West, 113.
+
+
+G
+
+Gantlet, running the, 15-16.
+
+Gareau, Leonard, journey and death of, 70.
+
+Garneau, cited, 5 n., 87 n.
+
+Gillam, Ben, encounters with Radisson, 163-164, 168-175.
+
+Gillam, Zechariah, Radisson's first transactions with, 135-136;
+Groseillers' voyage to Hudson Bay with, 138-139; at Rupert River with
+Hudson's Bay Company ship, 148; active enmity of, toward Radisson,
+165-167, 168-169, 171, 176, 180.
+
+Godefroy, Jean, companion of Radisson, 154.
+
+Godefroy family, the, 154 n.
+
+Goose month (April), 253-254.
+
+Gorst, Thomas, 140 n., 147 n.
+
+Grand River of the North.  _See_ Mackenzie River.
+
+Gray, Captain, 308.
+
+Great Falls of the Missouri, Lewis discovers the, 317.
+
+Great Rat, nation of the, 131, 365.
+
+Green Bay, western limit of French explorations until Radisson, 69;
+Radisson's winter quarters at, 79-80, 99-100.
+
+Groseillers, nephew of explorer, title of nobility ordered granted to,
+142.
+
+Groseillers, Jean Baptiste, accompanies Radisson to Hudson Bay (1682),
+154; trip up Hayes River, 158, 161; left in charge of Fort Bourbon,
+175; troubles with Indians and with English, 182-183; surrenders fort
+to Radisson, acting for Hudson's Bay Company, 184; letters to mother,
+184, 335-337; carried to England by force, 186; offer from Hudson's Bay
+Company, 187.
+
+Groseillers, Medard Chouart, birth, birthplace, and marriage, 45;
+journey to Lake Nipissing, 71; engages with Radisson in voyage of
+exploration to the West (1658), 71-79; winter quarters at Green Bay,
+79-80; explorations in West and Northwest, 80-90; return to Quebec, 99;
+second trip to Northwest (1661), 103-129; imprisoned and fined on
+return to Quebec (1663), 130; goes to France to seek reparation, 133;
+meets with neglect and indifference, 133-134; deceived into returning
+to Three Rivers and going to Isle Percee, 135; goes to Port Royal,
+N.S., becomes involved with Boston sea-captain, and reaches England
+_via_ Boston and Spain (1666), 135-137; backed by Prince Rupert, fits
+out ship for Hudson Bay, and spends year in trading expedition
+(1668-1669),138-139; on return to London, created a _Knight de la
+Jarretiere_, 139; second voyage from England (1670), 140; involved with
+Radisson in suspicions of double-dealing, 147-148; in meeting of fur
+traders at Quebec, 149; retires to family at Three Rivers, 151;
+summoned by Radisson to join expedition in private French interests to
+Hayes River (1681-1682), 153-158; successful trade in furs, 158, 167;
+jealousy and lawsuits on return to Quebec, 175-176; summoned to France
+by Colbert (1684), 176-177; petition for redress of wrongs ignored by
+French court, 179; gives up struggle and retires to Three Rivers, 179.
+
+
+H
+
+Hayes, Sir James, 180, 181.
+
+Hayes River, Radisson's canoe trip up the, 158-160; Fort Bourbon
+established on, 161; Radisson's second visit to, 182-186.
+
+Hayet, Marguerite, Radisson's sister, 6 n., 43; death of first husband,
+19, 45; marriage with Groseillers, 45; letters from son, 184, 335-337.
+
+Hayet, Sebastien, 6 n., 43 n.
+
+Hearne, Samuel, cited, 14 n.; departure from Fort Prince of Wales on
+exploring trip, 249-252; in the Barren Lands, 253-255, 259-260; crosses
+the Arctic Circle, 261; discovers the Coppermine River, 262-263;
+massacre of Eskimo by Indians accompanying, 264-265; arrival at Arctic
+Ocean, 265; takes possession of Arctic regions for Hudson's Bay
+Company, 266-267; returns up the Coppermine River and discovers copper
+mines, 267; travels in Athabasca region, 268-269; returns to Fort
+Prince of Wales, 269; becomes governor of post, 270; surrenders fort to
+the French, 271-272.
+
+Henault, Madeline, Radisson's mother, 6 n., 43.
+
+Hudson Bay, overland routes to, 71; Radisson's early discoveries
+regarding, 90-91, 127-128.
+
+_Hudson Bay_, Robson's, cited, 139 n., 140 n., 147 n., 161 n., 166 n.
+
+Hudson's Bay Company, origin of, 139-140; early expeditions, 140-149;
+distrust of Radisson by, 150; contract between Radisson and, 181-182;
+final treaty of peace made between Indians and, 185; poor treatment of
+Radisson by, 188; quietly prosperous career of, 241-242; encroachments
+of French traders, 242-243; demand for activity, 243-244; possession
+taken of Arctic regions for, by Hearne, 266-267.
+
+Huron Indians, death songs of, 24, 54; massacre of Christian, by
+Iroquois, 50-54; band of, with Dollard, against the Iroquois, 97-98;
+territory of, 359; tribes of, at Michilimackinac, 364.
+
+Husky dogs, 277.
+
+
+I
+
+Icebergs, Labradorian, 155.
+
+Iroquois Confederacy, the five tribes composing the, 34;
+characteristics of, 366.
+
+Iroquois Indians, murder of inhabitants of Three Rivers by, 5 n., 19,
+45; treatment of prisoners by, 15-16, 25-28, 54; Radisson's life with,
+16-39; Frenchmen at Montreal scalped by, 48; hostages of, held at
+Quebec, 48, 55-56; siege of Onondaga by, 55-67; encounters between
+Algonquins and Radisson and, 76-78, 79-80;  Radisson's fight with, on
+the Grand Sault, 94-96; Bollard's battle with, 97-98; Radisson's fights
+with, on second Western trip, 107-108, 109-111; wars between Algonquins
+and, 359.
+
+Isle of Massacres, 50-54.
+
+Issaguy tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+
+
+J
+
+Jemmeraie, Sieur de la, De la Verendrye's lieutenant, 197, 203, 205,
+209, 210; death of, 211.
+
+_Jesuit Relations_, cited, 57 n., 69 n., 71 n., 73 n., 80 n., 81 n., 82
+n., 91 n., 92 n., 96 n., 141 n.; quoted, 88.
+
+Jesuits, in Onondaga expedition, 44-67; lives of Iroquois saved by, 65;
+start with Radisson and Groseillers on first Western expedition, 73;
+turn back to Montreal, 77.
+
+Jogues, Father, 4, 56, 68, 69.
+
+Jolliet, 84 n., 149, 151.
+
+
+K
+
+Kaministiquia, fur post at, 204.
+
+Kickapoo Indians, location of, 364.
+
+King Charles Fort.  _See_ Fort King Charles.
+
+Kirke, Mary, marriage with Radisson, 138; becomes a Catholic, 152.
+
+Kirke, Sir John, shareholder in Hudson's Bay Company, 140; claims of,
+against New France, 152; forbids daughter's going to France, 152;
+friendly influence used for Radisson, 180.
+
+_Knight de la Jarretiere_, Groseillers created a, 139.
+
+
+L
+
+La Barre, governor of New France, 176
+
+La Chesnaye, cited, 115 n., 131 n.; backs Radisson in Northern
+expedition, 152-153; outcome of Radisson's dealings with, 175-176.
+
+Lake Assiniboel, 366.
+
+"Lake of the Castors," the (Lake Nipissing), 76 n., 106 n., 364.
+
+Lake Ontario, tribes about, 366.
+
+Lake Superior, exploration of, by Radisson, 89; explorer's second visit
+to, 111-112.
+
+Lamoignon, M. de, president of Company of Normandy, 355, 356, 357.
+
+La Perouse, French admiral, 271.
+
+Lariviere, companion of Radisson and Groseillers, 105, 106-107.
+
+La Salle, 84 n., 85, 149, 151, 194.
+
+Lauzon, M. de, governor of Company of Normandy, 355-356, 368.
+
+La Valliere, 103.
+
+La Verendrye.  _See_ De la Verendrye.
+
+Ledyard, John, 308.
+
+_Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_, cited, 46 n., 58 n., 60 n., 63 n.,
+81 n., 90 n., 96 n., 98 n., 139 n.
+
+Lewis, Meriwether, starts on expedition to explore Missouri and
+Columbia rivers, 308-309; reaches villages of Mandan Indians, 311-313;
+first views the Rocky Mountains, 314-315; discovers the Great Falls of
+the Missouri, 317; narrowly escapes death from a bear, 318-319; enters
+the Gates of the Rockies, 321; reaches sources of the Missouri,
+322-323; makes friends with Snake Indians, 323-327; crosses Divide to
+the Clearwater River and travels down the Columbia, 327; arrival on
+Pacific Ocean, 327; winters at Fort Clatsop (1805-1806), 327-328;
+return trip by main stream of the Missouri, 329; adventures with
+Minnetaree Indians, 329-331; arrival at St. Louis, 332; tribute to
+character and qualities of, 332-333.
+
+Liberte, traitor in Lewis and Clark's expedition, 311.
+
+Little Missouri, Lewis and Clark pass the, 313.
+
+"Little Sticks," region of, 253-254, 259-260.
+
+London, Radisson's first visit to, 137-138.
+
+Long Sault, Rapids of, Dollard's battle at, 96-98, 198.
+
+Lord Preston, English envoy in France, 177, 180, 181.
+
+Low, A. P., quoted, 128 n., 146 n., 149 n.
+
+
+M
+
+Mackay, Alexander, Mackenzie's lieutenant, 288, 291, 292, 293, 296, 299.
+
+Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, early career of, 276; stationed at Fort
+Chipewyan, 276-277; exploration of Mackenzie River by, 280-285; crosses
+the Arctic Circle, 285; reaches Arctic Ocean, 285-286; returns up the
+Mackenzie to Fort Chipewyan, 286; exploration of Peace River by,
+288-294; discovers source of Peace River, 294; crosses the Divide and
+reaches head waters of Fraser River, 294; travels down the Fraser,
+294-298; adventures with Indians, 298-300; reaches the Pacific Ocean,
+302-303; return to Fort Chipewyan _via_ Peace River, 304-305; later
+life, 306.
+
+Mackenzie, Charles, 311.
+
+Mackenzie, Roderick, 278, 279.
+
+Mackenzie River, exploration of, 280-287, 296-302.
+
+Mandan Indians, bath of purification practised by, 14 n.; Radisson
+discovers the, 86, 88; De la Verendrye's visit to, 222, 225-227; the
+younger De la Verendryes' second visit to, 230-231; Lewis and Clark at
+villages of, 311-313, 332.
+
+Manitoba, Radisson's explorations in, 113-128.
+
+Marquette, Pere, 84 n.
+
+Martin, Abraham, Plains of Abraham named for, 45 n.
+
+Martin, Helen, Groseillers' first wife, 45 n.
+
+Martiniere, plan of, to capture Radisson for French, 188.
+
+Mascoutins, "people of the fire," 80, 131 n., 364, 365; location of
+the, 86; Radisson among the, 100.
+
+Matonabbee, chief of Chipewyans, 248-249; aid afforded Hearne by,
+256-263; massacre of Eskimo directed by, 264-265; suicide of, 272.
+
+Menard, Father, 105, 112.
+
+Messaiger, Father, 204, 205, 209.
+
+Miami Indians, location of the, 364.
+
+Michigan, Indian tribes in, 364.
+
+Michilimackinac, Island of, Radisson; passes, 112; early headquarters
+of fur trade, 201; Indian tribes at, 364.
+
+Micmac Indians, the, 363.
+
+Minnesota, dispute as to discovery of eastern, 71 n.; Radisson's
+explorations in, 89; Radisson may have wintered in, on second trip, 113.
+
+Minnetaree Indians, Lewis and the, 329-331.
+
+Mississippi, Radisson discovers the Upper, 80-81.
+
+Mississippi Valley, Radisson first to explore the, 85-89.
+
+Missouri, tribes of the, 86; De la Verendrye takes possession of the
+Upper, 225; Lewis and Clark explore the, 313-323.
+
+Mistassini, Lake, Father Albanel at, 146.
+
+Mistassini Indians, the, 363.
+
+Mohawk Indians, murder of French of Three Rivers by, 5 n., 19, 45;
+adoption of Radisson by a family of, 17; murder of three, by Radisson
+and an Algonquin, 20; jealous as to French settlement among Onondagas,
+47-48; siege of Onondaga by, 55-59; outwitted by Radisson at Onondaga,
+59-67; location of the, 364.
+
+Montagnais Indians, the, 363.
+
+Montana, punishment of Indians by scouts in, 25 n.
+
+Montmagny, M. de, governor in Canada, 353-354.
+
+Montreal, expedition for Onondaga leaves, 47; Iroquois scalp Frenchmen
+at, 48; return of Onondaga party, 66; De la Verendrye's departure from,
+194-197; Indian tribes located in vicinity of, 363-364.
+
+Munck, explorations of, 134 n.
+
+
+N
+
+"Nation of the Grand Rat," 131, 365.
+
+Nelson River, Radisson on the, 140, 161, 164-167, 170-174, 179 n.
+
+Nemisco River, called the Rupert, 139.
+
+Nepigon, De la Verendrye at, 201, 202.
+
+New York in 1653, 41-42.
+
+_New York Colonial Documents_, 9 n.
+
+Nez Perces Indians, help given to Lewis and Clark by, 328.
+
+Nicolet, Jean, 68, 69.
+
+Nicolls, Colonel Richard, quoted, 136 n.
+
+Nipissing, Lake, 76 n., 106 n., 364.
+
+Nipissinien Indians, the, 364.
+
+Northwest, the Great, discovery of, by Radisson, 80-85.
+
+Northwest Fur Company, the, 279, 280, 287.
+
+Northwest Passage, reward of L20,000 offered for discovery of, 278.
+
+Norton, Marie, 247, 270, 271-272.
+
+Norton, Moses, governor of Fort Prince of Wales, 244; character of,
+246-247; death of, 269-270.
+
+
+O
+
+Ochagach, Indian hunter, 202.
+
+Octbaton tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+
+Ojibway Indians, 115, 365.
+
+Oldmixon, John, cited, 92 n., 114 n., 130 n., 147 n.
+
+Omaha Indians, Radisson's possible visit to, 86, 88.
+
+Omtou tribe of Indians, 131 n.
+
+Oneida Indians, the, 34, 364.
+
+Onondaga, settlement at, 46; Iroquois conspiracy against, 46-48;
+garrison besieged at, 55-63; escape of French from, 64-67.
+
+Onondaga tribe, the, 34; Jesuit mission among (1656), 46-47;
+treacherous conduct of, toward Christian Hurons, 50-54.
+
+Orange.  _See_ Albany.
+
+Orimha, Radisson's Mohawk name, 16.
+
+Oudiette, Jean, 154 n.
+
+"Ouinipeg," Lake, 69, 71.
+
+Outanlouby Indians, the, 364.
+
+
+P
+
+Pacific Ocean, Mackenzie's expedition reaches the, 302-303; Lewis and
+Clark's expedition reaches, 327.
+
+Papinachois Indians, the, 363.
+
+Parkman, Francis, cited, 5 n., 19 n., 46 n., 87 n., 96 n.
+
+_Pays d'en Haut_, "Up-Country," defined, 201 n.
+
+Peace River, the, 281; exploration of, 287; Mackenzie reaches the
+source of the, 294.
+
+Pemmican, defined, 223.
+
+"People of the Fire," the, Mascoutin Indians, 80 n., 86 n., 100, 131 n.
+
+Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior, the, 112.
+
+Piescaret, Algonquin chief, 4.
+
+Pipe of peace, smoking the, 121-123.
+
+Plains of Abraham, named for Abraham Martin, 45 n.
+
+Poinsy, M. de, commander at St. Christopher, 353.
+
+Poissons Blancs (White Fish) Indians, the, 363.
+
+Poncet, Pere, 41.
+
+Port Nelson, 140, 161-175, 182-186.
+
+Port Royal, Nova Scotia, Radisson and Groseillers at, 135.
+
+Prince Maximilian, 226.
+
+Prince Rupert, patron of French explorers, 138-139, 180; first governor
+of Hudson's Bay Company, 140.
+
+Prisoners, treatment of, by Iroquois, 15-16, 25-28, 54.
+
+Prudhomme, Mr. Justice, 88 n.
+
+Purification, bath of, Indian rite, 14, 268.
+
+
+Q
+
+Quebec, Iroquois hostages for safety of Onondaga held at, 48, 55-56;
+celebration at, on return of Radisson and Groseillers, 99; meeting of
+fur traders at (1676), 149; Indian tribes located about, 363.
+
+
+R
+
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit (the elder), 6 n., 43 n.
+
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit, uncle of the explorer, 43 n.
+
+Radisson, Pierre Esprit, date and place of birth, 6; genealogy of, 6
+n., 43 n.; captured by Iroquois Indians, 9; adopted into Mohawk tribe,
+17; escape to Fort Orange (1653), 39-41; proof of Catholicism of, 41
+n.; visits Europe and returns to Three Rivers (1654), 42-44; joins
+expedition to Onondaga (1657), 47; besieged by Iroquois throughout
+winter, 55-64; saves the garrison and returns to Montreal, 65-67; goes
+on trapping and exploring trip to the West (1658), 73-74; reaches Lake
+Nipissing and Lake Huron, 78; in winter quarters at Green Bay, 79-80;
+crosses present state of Wisconsin and discovers Upper Mississippi,
+80-85; explorations to the west and south, 86-89; in Minnesota and
+Manitoba, 89-91; encounter with Iroquois at Long Sault of the Ottawa,
+94-96; at scene of Dollard's fight of a week before, 96-98; arrival at
+Quebec (1660), 99; sets forth on voyage of discovery toward Hudson Bay
+(1661), 105; traverses Lake Superior, 111-112; builds fort and winters
+west of present Duluth, 113-116; visits the Sioux, 123-124; reaches
+Lake Winnipeg, 127; returns to Quebec (1663), 129; bad treatment by
+French officials, 130; goes to France to gain his rights, 133-134;
+ill-treatment, deception by Rochelle merchant, dealings with Captain
+Gillam of Boston, and visit to Boston (1665), 134-136; goes to England,
+137-138; marriage with Mary Kirke, 138; formation of Hudson's Bay
+Company (1670), 139-140; trading voyage to Port Nelson (1671), 140-141;
+recalled to England and poorly treated (1674-1675), 148; receives
+commission in French navy (1675-1676), 148; complications between
+wife's father and French government, 152; backed by La Chesnaye,
+engages in new expedition to Hudson Bay, 152-153; returns to Quebec
+(1681) and sails to Hayes River (1682), 153-158; troubles with English
+and Boston ships, 161-175; jealousy and lawsuits on return to Quebec,
+175-177; unsuccessfully presses claims in France, 179-180; commissioned
+by Hudson's Bay Company, 181-182; sails to Hayes River and takes
+possession of Fort Bourbon and French furs (1684), 182-185; return to
+England, 186-187; annual voyages to Hudson Bay for five years, 188;
+distrusted on breaking out of war with France, and neglect in old age,
+188-189: consideration of character and career, 189-190.
+
+_Radisson's Relation_, cited, 9 n., 46 n., 63 n., 80 n., 81 n., 98 n.,
+99 n., 122, 127, 163 n., 179; language used in, 82; time of writing,
+138.
+
+Ragueneau, Father Paul, 46 n., 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59 n., 63 n.
+
+Rascal Village, Indian camp, 305.
+
+Red River, first white men on, 219.
+
+Rhythm as an Indian characteristic, 160 n.
+
+Ricaree Indians, insolence of, to Lewis and Clark, 311-312.
+
+Robson, cited, 139, 140, 147, 161, 166.
+
+Rochelle, Radisson's visit to, in 1654, 43.
+
+Rocky Mountains, Radisson's nearest approach to the, 89; Pierre de la
+Verendrye reaches the, 233; Lewis's first view of the, 314-315; Lewis
+and Clark enter Gates of the, 321.
+
+Rouen, merchants of, interested in Canada trade, 352, 353, 357.
+
+Roy, J. Edmond, cited, 102 n.
+
+Roy, R., translations of documents, 335.
+
+Rupert River, the Nemisco renamed the, 139.
+
+
+S
+
+Sacajawea, squaw guide to Lewis and Clark, 312, 321, 326, 332.
+
+St. Louis, departure of Lewis and Clark's expedition from, 308-309;
+return to, 332.
+
+Saint-Lusson, Sieur de, 142.
+
+Saint-Pierre, Legardeur de, 236-237.
+
+Saskatchewan River, exploration of, 229.
+
+Sautaux Indians, the, 89-90, 92 n., 131 n., 365.
+
+Scalp dance, the, 12, 14.
+
+Seneca Indians, the, 34, 55, 364.
+
+Sioux Indians, the, 69; Radisson and the, 85, 88, 120-124; desire of,
+for firearms, 120, 122; location of the, 365.
+
+Skull-crackers, Indian, defined, 25, 121.
+
+Slave Lake, Mackenzie on, 282.
+
+Slave Lake Indians, the, 280, 282, 290.
+
+Smith, Donald (Lord Strathcona), 275-276.
+
+Snake Indians, Lewis and Clark make friends with, 323-326.
+
+Society of One Hundred.  _See_ Company of One Hundred Associates.
+
+Songs, Indian, 159, 160.
+
+Sturgeons, Radisson's river of, 112.
+
+Sulte, Benjamin, cited, 4, 5 n., 6 n., 7 n., 19 n., 43 n., 68 n., 76
+n., 86 n., 99 n., 102 n., 139 n., 154 n.
+
+
+T
+
+Tadoussac (Quebec), Company of, 352.
+
+Talon, intendant of New France, 7 n., 142-143, 357-358, 360, 367, 368.
+
+Tanguay, Abbe, 5 n., 19 n., 88 n.
+
+Tar bed, Mackenzie's discovery of a, in the Arctic, 286.
+
+Temiscamingue Indians, the, 364.
+
+Thousand Islands, massacre of Huron captives by Iroquois at, 53-54.
+
+Three Forks of the Missouri, Lewis and Clark arrive at, 321.
+
+Three Rivers, population of, 7 n.; in 1654, 44-45; De la Verendrye born
+at, 201; Indians of, 363.
+
+Touret, Eli Godefroy, French spy, 137.
+
+Torture, Indian methods of, 15-16, 25-28, 54.
+
+_Travaille_, defined, 224.
+
+_Tripe de roches_, defined, 78.
+
+
+V
+
+Verendrye.  _See_ De la Verendrye.
+
+Ville-Marie (Montreal), Indian tribes about, 363-364.
+
+Voorhis, Mrs. Julia Clark, Clark letters owned by, 312 n.
+
+
+W
+
+Wampum, significance to Indians, 17.
+
+War-cry, Indian, sounds representing the, 11 n.
+
+Waste, viewed by Indians as crime, 60.
+
+West Indies Company.  _See_ Company of the West Indies.
+
+Windsor, member of Lewis and Clark's expedition, 315-316.
+
+Winnipeg, Lake, first reports of, 69, 71; Radisson arrives at, 127;
+rumours of a tide on, 216; De la Verendrye on, 216-218.
+
+Wisconsin, Radisson's travels in, 80-8l, 89.
+
+Wolf Indians located at Three Rivers, 363.
+
+Wyandotte Indians, the, 364.
+
+
+Y
+
+Yellowstone River, exploration of, by Lewis and Clark, 313, 329.
+
+York (Port Nelson), 140, 161-175, 182-186.
+
+Young, Sir William, champions Radisson's cause, 180, 181, 188.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pathfinders of the West, by A. C. Laut
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