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Springtime came at last, and the two traders proceeded merrily up the Fox River, still in the wake of Nicolet, past the sites of the present cities of Green Bay, De Pere, Kaukauna, Appleton, Neenah, and Menasha. They frequently had to carry their boats around the rapids and waterfalls, but after passing Doty's Island they had a smooth highway. Paddling through Lake Winnebago, and past the site of Oshkosh, then an Indian village, they pushed on through the winding reaches of the Upper Fox, and at last came to a broad prairie near Berlin, whereon was stationed the village of the Mascoutins, or Fire Nation.

The Mascoutins treated the strangers, as they had Nicolet, with great kindness. With this village as headquarters, the explorers made frequent expeditions, "anxious to be knowne with the remotest people." Radisson quaintly writes, "We ware 4 moneths in our voyage without doeing any thing but goe from river to river." The explorers cared little, we may suppose, except to have a good time and make a profitable trade with the Indians; they do not appear to have made any map. Writing about their travels, many years after, Radisson says, in one place, that they went into a "great river" which flowed southward, and journeyed to a land of continual warmth, finer than Italy, where he heard the Indians describe certain white men living to the south, who might be Spaniards. It is supposed by many historians that Radisson meant that he was on the Mississippi; if this supposition be true, then the two explorers undoubtedly found the great river by going up the Fox from the Mascoutin village, carrying their canoe over the mile and a half of intervening marsh at Portage, and gliding down the Wisconsin to its junction with the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien. This is important, for the credit of discovering the Upper Mississippi is usually given to Louis Joliet and Father Marquette, who took this very course in 1673, eighteen years later. But the whole question of what "great river" Radisson meant to describe is so involved in doubt, that very likely we shall never know the truth about it.

Leaving their Mascoutin friends at last, apparently in the autumn of 1655, the two adventurers returned down the Fox River to Green Bay; thence on to the large villages of Indians which clustered around the Sault Ste. Marie. Received there, as elsewhere, with much feasting and good will, Radisson and Groseilliers conducted trade with their hosts, and explored a long stretch of the southern coast of Lake Superior, but do not appear to have ventured so far as the Pictured Rocks. They also made long expeditions into the country, on snowshoes, to visit and trade with other tribes in the Michigan Peninsula and northern Wisconsin, and even as far off as Hudson Bay, at one time being accompanied by a hundred and fifty Indian hunters.

In this wild fashion they spent the winter of 1655-56, and finally reached Quebec in August, 1656. They had been absent from home for two years, and had experienced many singular adventures. It happened that during their absence the Iroquois had succeeded in keeping the Hurons and other friendly Indians from visiting Quebec, so that the fur trade, upon which New France depended, was now quite ruined; for this reason the arrival of Radisson and Groseilliers, with a great store of furs from far-away Wisconsin and Lake Superior, was hailed as a joyful event, and, despite their having departed without a license, they were made welcome at Quebec, the cannons being fired and the people flocking on the beach to meet them.

Men who love adventure cannot be kept out of it long, whatever the risk. Three years later, in the summer of 1659, Radisson and Groseilliers again set off for Lake Superior, up the old Ottawa and Georgian Bay routes. This time they were specially bidden by the king's officers at Quebec not to go, so that they were obliged to slip off secretly, and join a fleet of Indian canoes returning home after the annual trade at the French settlements.

At Sault Ste. Marie they spent a short time with their savage friends, and then paddled westward, along the southern shore of Lake Superior. In their company were several Huron and Ottawa Indians, who had recently been compelled to flee to Wisconsin because of Iroquois raids, which now extended as far west as Michigan. The travelers were obliged to carry their boats across Keweenaw Point, and at last found their way to Chequamegon Bay, a noble sheet of water, hemmed in by the beautiful Apostle Islands, and to-day a popular summer resort.

Not far to the west of where Ashland now lies, somewhere near Whittlesey's Creek, they built for themselves a rude hut, or fort, of logs. The place was a small point of land jutting out into the water, a triangle, Radisson describes it, with water on two sides and land at the base. The land side of the triangle was guarded with a palisade of pointed stakes, and to prevent surprises by night, for Indians were always prowling about looking for plunder, the traders surrounded their house with boughs of trees piled one upon the other, intertwined with a long cord hung with little bells.

Angered at this treatment, Groseilliers went to Paris to seek justice from the king; but, obtaining none, he and Radisson offered their services to the English, whom they told of Hudson Bay and its great furtrading possibilities. It took several years, however, for negotiations to be completed; and it was while in London that Radisson, for the information of the English king, wrote his now famous journal of explorations in the Lake Superior country. Finally, after some unfortunate voyages, our explorers, in 1669, reached Hudson Bay in an English ship; and, as a result, there was formed in England the great Hudson Bay Company, which from that day to this has controlled the rich fur trade of those northern waters.

THE STORY OF JOLIET AND MARQUETTE

In history there are two "discoveries of the Mississippi"; the lower waters were discovered by the Spanish explorer, De Soto ; and the upper waters, by Frenchmen from Canada or New France. Nothing came of De Soto's discovery for over a hundred years, for the Spaniards had no love for exploration that gave no promise of mines of precious metals, and it is to the French that we give chief credit for finding the Mississippi; for their discovery immediately led the way to a general knowledge of the geography and the savages of the great valley, and to settlements there by whites.

It is seldom safe to say who was the first man to discover anything, be it in geography, in science, or in the arts; generally, we can tell only who it was that made the first record of the discovery. Now it is quite possible that Frenchmen may have wandered into the Upper Mississippi valley before Radisson and Groseilliers appeared in Wisconsin ; but, if they did, we do not know of it. It is still a matter of dispute whether the "great river" described in Radisson's journal was the Mississippi; some writers think that it was, and that to him and to Groseilliers belongs the honor of the first-recorded discovery. Then, again, there are some who think that in 1670 the famous fur trader La Salle was upon the Mississippi; but that is a mere guess, and honors cannot be awarded upon guesswork. We do know, however, that in 1673 Joliet and Marquette set out for the very purpose of finding the Mississippi, and succeeded; and that upon their return they wrote reports of their trip and made maps of the country. Having thus opened the door, as it were, white men were thereafter frequent travelers on the broad waterway. Hence it is idle to discuss possible previous visits; to Joliet and Marquette are due the credit of regular, premeditated discovery.

Louis Joliet, who led this celebrated expedition, was at the time but twenty-eight years old. He was born in Quebec, had been educated at the Jesuit college there, and early in life became a fur trader. He learned several Indian languages, and made numerous long journeys into the wilderness, and, like Jean Nicolet before him, was regarded by the officers and the missionaries at Quebec as a man well fitted for the life of an explorer. In 1671 he went with Saint Lusson, one of the officials of New France, to Sault Ste. Marie. St. Lusson made peace with the Indians of the Northwest, and, in the name of the king of France, took possession of all the country bordering on the upper Great Lakes.

Upon returning to Quebec, Joliet met the famous Count Frontenac, but recently arrived from Paris, where he had been appointed as governor of New France. Frontenac was curious to know more about the Mississippi River, especially whether it flowed into the Pacific Ocean, or the "Southern Sea" as it was then called in Europe. In looking about for a man to head an expedition to the great river, he could hear of no one better prepared for such service than Joliet.

In those early days, no exploring party was complete without a priest; the conversion of the savages to Christianity was quite as important, in the eyes of the king, as the development of the fur trade. Father Jacques Marquette, then thirty-six years of age, was the Jesuit missionary at Point St. Ignace, on the Straits of Mackinac. When Joliet reached that outpost, after a long and weary canoe voyage up the now familiar Ottawa River and Georgian Bay route, he delivered orders to Marquette to join his party. Joliet was a favorite with his old instructors, the Jesuits, so that the two young men were well pleased with being united upon this project, Joliet to attend to the worldly affairs of the expedition, and Marquette to the religious. Both of them had had long training in the hard life of the wilderness, and understood Indian character and habits as well as any men in New France.

It was upon the 17th of May, 1673, that the two explorers, in high spirits, set forth from Marquette's little mission at Point Ignace. Five French boatmen paddled their two canoes, and did most of the heavy work of the journey, carrying the boats and cargoes around rapids, or along portage trails from one river to another. Marquette says in his journal: "Our joy at being chosen for this expedition roused our courage, and sweetened the labor of paddling from morning to night."

The course they took was, no doubt, that followed through nearly two hundred years thereafter by persons journeying in canoes from Mackinac to Green Bay. They paddled along the northern shores of Lake Michigan and Green Bay, until they could cross over through the stormy water known as "Death's Door," to the islands beyond the Door county peninsula; and then crept down the east shore of Green Bay, under the lee of the high banks.

They seem to have made good time, for on the 7th of June they reached the village of the Mascoutins, on the south shore of Fox River, near where Berlin now is, the same village, it will be remembered, where Nicolet, Radisson, and Allouez had already been entertained. We do not know upon what day our two explorers had reached De Pere, where the Jesuit mission was established, but they probably stayed among their friends there for some days, before going up the Fox.

In his journal, the good missionary described nearly everything he saw, with much detail. The Menominee Indians interested him greatly; he calls them "the People of the Wild Oats," and tells how they gather the grain of these wild oats , by "shaking the ears, on their right and left, into the canoe as they advance" through the swamps. Then they take the grain to the land, strip it of much of the chaff, and "dry it in the smoke on a wooden lattice, under which they keep up a small fire for several days. When the oats are well dried, they put them in a skin of the form of a bag, which is then forced into a hole made on purpose in the ground; then they tread it out, so long and so well, that the grain being freed from the chaff is easily winnowed; after which they reduce it to meal." There are still to be seen, on the shores of Lake Koshkonong, and several other Wisconsin lakes and rivers, the shallow, bowl-like holes used by the Indians in threshing this grain, as described by Marquette two and a quarter centuries ago.

The Mascoutin village also claims much attention in the missionary's diary. The Mascoutins themselves are rude, he says; so also are the Kickapoos, many of whom live with them. At this village are also many Miami Indians, who had fled from their homes in Indiana and Ohio, through fear of the fierce Iroquois of New York. These Miamis are, Marquette tells us, superior to the Wisconsin Indians, being "more civil, liberal, and better made; they wear two long earlocks, which give them a good appearance," and are brave, docile, and devout, listening carefully to the missionaries who have visited them. The Father also describes the site of the village: "I felt no little pleasure in beholding the position of this town; the view is beautiful and very picturesque, for from the eminence on which it is perched, the eye discovers on every side prairies spreading away beyond its reach, interspersed with thickets or groves of lofty trees. The soil is very good, producing much corn; the Indians gather also quantities of plums and grapes, from which good wine could be made, if they chose. As bark for cabins is rare in this country, they use rushes, which serve them for walls and roof, but which are no great shelter against the wind, and still less against the rain when it falls in torrents. The advantage of this kind of cabins is that they can roll them up, and carry them easily where they like in hunting-time."

Above the Mascoutin village, the Fox begins to narrow, being hemmed in, and often choked, by broad swamps of reeds and wild oats. The canoe traveler who does not know the channel, is sometimes in danger of missing it, and getting entangled in the maze of bayous. Two Miami guides were therefore obtained from their hosts, and on the 10th of June the travelers set off for the southwest, "in the sight of a great crowd, who could not wonder enough to see seven Frenchmen alone in two canoes, dare to undertake so strange and so hazardous an expedition." The guides safely conducted them to the place where is now situated the city of Portage, helped them over the swampy plain of a mile and a half in width, and, after seeing them embarked upon the broad waters of the Wisconsin River, left them "alone in an unknown country, in the hands of Providence."

The broad valley of the Wisconsin presents a far different appearance from that of the peacefully flowing Upper Fox, with its outlying marshes of reeds, and its numerous lakes. The Wisconsin, or Meskousing, as Marquette writes it, is flanked by ranges of bold, heavily wooded bluffs, which are furrowed with romantic ravines, while the channel is, at low water, studded with islands and sand bars, and in times of flood spreads to a great width. Marquette himself describes it thus: "It is very broad, with a sandy bottom, forming many shallows, which render navigation very difficult. It is full of vine-clad islets. On the banks appear fertile lands diversified with wood, prairie, and hill. Here you find oaks, walnut, whitewood, and another kind of tree with branches armed with long thorns. We saw no small game or fish, but deer and moose in considerable numbers." About ninety miles below Portage, they thought that they discovered an iron mine.

At last, on the 17th of June, they swiftly glided through the picturesque delta of the Wisconsin, near Prairie du Chien, and found themselves upon the Mississippi, grateful that after so long and tiresome a journey they had found the object of their search. Joliet's instructions were, however, to ascertain whether the great stream flowed into the "Southern Sea"; so they journeyed as far down as the mouth of the Arkansas. There they gathered information from the Indians which led them to believe that the river emptied into the Gulf of Mexico; thus the old riddle of the supposed waterway through the heart of the North American continent was left unsolved.

In returning, Joliet and Marquette came up the Illinois River, and reached Lake Michigan by portaging over to the Chicago River. They were back at the Jesuit mission at De Pere, in September. Marquette having fallen ill, Joliet was obliged to return to Quebec alone, leaving the missionary to spend the winter with his Wisconsin friends. When almost within sight of the French settlement at Montreal, at the mouth of the Ottawa River, poor Joliet lost all his papers in the dangerous Lachine rapids, and could make only a verbal report to the government. He later prepared a map of his route, with great care, and forwarded that to France; it is one of the best maps of the interior parts of North America made in the seventeenth century. Joliet, as the leader of the expedition, had hoped to receive, either in office or lands, substantial rewards for his great discoveries; but there were now new officials at Quebec, with whom he had little influence, and the recompense of this brave spirit was small. Others reaped what advantages there were in the opening of the Mississippi valley to the fur trade.

On the other hand, the unworldly priest who was his friend and companion, and who neither desired nor needed special recognition for what he had done, has, all unconsciously, won most of the glory of this brilliant enterprise. Under the rules of the Jesuit order, each missionary in New France was obliged to forward to his superior at Quebec, once each year, a written journal of his doings. Marquette prepared his report at leisure during the winter, while at De Pere, and in the spring sent it down to Quebec, by an Indian who was going thither to trade with the whites. Accompanying it was a crudely drawn but fairly accurate map of the Mississippi basin. The journal and map arrived safely, but for some reason neither was then printed; indeed, they remained almost unknown to the world for a hundred and seventy-nine years, being at last published in 1852. Marquette never learned the fate of either Joliet's elaborate records or his own simple story of the expedition, for he died in May, 1675, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, worn out by disease and by excessive labors in behalf of the Indians.

THE JESUIT MISSIONARIES

In planting settlements in Canada , the French had two principal objects in view: the fur trade with the Indians, and the conversion of these Indians to the Christian religion. Roman Catholic missionaries from France therefore accompanied the first settlers, and were always prominent in the affairs of the colony. Governor Champlain brought to Quebec some missionaries of the Recollect order, a branch of the Franciscans; but after a few years, the difficulties of their task proved so great that the Recollects asked the Jesuits, a much stronger order, to come over and help them. It was not long before nearly all the Franciscans returned home, and the Jesuits were practically the only missionaries in New France.

During the first few years, these missionaries spent their winters in Quebec, ministering to the colonists, and each spring went out to meet the Indians in their summer camps. It was soon found, however, that greater persistence was needed; and after that, instead of returning home in the autumn, they followed the savages upon their winter hunts. In order to convert the Indians, the missionaries studied their many languages, their habits, and their manner of thought, lived as they lived, and with them often suffered untold misery, for life in a savage camp is sometimes almost unbearable to educated and refined white men, such as the French Jesuits were. They did not succeed in winning over to Christianity many of their savage companions; indeed, the latter frequently treated them with great cruelty, and several of the missionaries were tortured to death.

Such were the ignorance and superstition of the Indians, that every disaster which happened to them, poor luck in hunting, famine, accident, or disease, was attributed to the "black gowns," as the Jesuits were called because of their long black cassocks. When the missionaries were performing the rites of their church, baptizing children or sick people, or saying mass, it was thought by these simple barbarians that they were practicing magic for the destruction of the red men. Thus the Jesuits, during the hundred years or more which they spent in traveling far and near through the forests of New France, seeking new tribes to convert, while still laboring with those already known, were in a state of perpetual martyrdom for the cause of Christianity. No soldier has ever performed greater acts of heroism than these devoted disciples of the cross. Several of the best and bravest of them were among the pioneers of the Wisconsin wilderness.

The first Jesuit missionary to come to Wisconsin was Father Ren? M?nard . He had sailed from France to Canada in the year 1640, when he was thirty-five years old, and on his arrival was sent to the savages east of Lake Huron, among whom he labored and suffered for eight years. Later, he went to the Iroquois, in New York, and at last had to fly for his life, on account of an Indian plot to murder all the French missionaries in that country. He was for some time the superior of his order, at the Three Rivers mission, on the St. Lawrence, halfway between Quebec and Montreal, and in the early autumn of 1660 was summoned to go to Lake Superior, which had been made known through the explorations of Radisson and Groseilliers.

These brave adventurers had returned from their second voyage into the Northwest, accompanied by a fleet of Indian canoes; several of the canoes were manned by Hurons from the Black River, who had come down all the way to Montreal to trade their furs for European goods. The red men spent some ten days there, feasting with the fur trade agents, and about the first of September set out on their return. With them were M?nard, his servant, and seven other Frenchmen.

In the spring of 1661, while at Keweenaw Bay, M?nard received an invitation to visit a band of poor, starving Hurons at the headwaters of the Black River. Several of these Indians had been baptized by Jesuits before the Iroquois had driven them out from their old home to the east of Lake Huron. In spite of his weak condition, and the many perils of this journey of a hundred and fifty miles through the dense forest, the aged missionary bade farewell to the Keweenaw Ottawas, among whom had also wintered several French fur traders, and in July set out to obey the new summons. In his company were his servant and several Hurons who had come to trade with the Ottawas.

They proceeded along the narrow trail which ran from Keweenaw Bay to Lake Vieux D?sert, the headwaters of the Wisconsin River, but the feeble missionary's gait was too slow for the Indians, who, after the manner of their kind, promptly deserted their white friends, leaving them to follow and obtain food as best they might. At the lake the Frenchmen embarked in a canoe upon the south-flowing Wisconsin, and paddled down as far as Bill Cross Rapids, some five or six miles above the mouth of Copper River, and not far from where is now the city of Merrill. From the foot of these rapids, they had intended leaving their canoe, and following a trail which led off westward through the woods to the headwaters of the Black, near the present town of Chelsea. M?nard's servant took the canoe through the rapids, while the missionary, as usual, to lighten the boat, walked along the portage trail. He must have lost his way and perished of exposure in the depths of the dark and tangled forest, for his servant could not find any trace of him. Thus closed the career of Wisconsin's pioneer missionary, who died in the pursuit of duty, as might a soldier upon the field of battle.

The death of M?nard left the Lake Superior country without a missionary; but four years later , another Jesuit was sent thither in the person of Claude Allouez , who chose Chequamegon Bay for the seat of his labors. There he found a squalid village, near Radisson and Groseilliers' old forts, on the southwest shore; it was composed of remnants of eight or ten tribes, some of whom had been driven westward by the Iroquois and others eastward by the Sioux. He called his mission La Pointe, from the neighboring long point of land which, projecting northward, divides Chequamegon Bay from Lake Superior.

Allouez could make little impression upon these poor savages. After four years of hard service and ill-treatment, he was relieved by Jacques Marquette, a youthful and enthusiastic priest. Late in the autumn of 1669, Allouez went to Fox River, and there he founded the mission of St. Francis Xavier, overlooking the rapids of De Pere. This was a more successful mission than the one at Chequamegon Bay; for, during the next summer, the western Sioux furiously attacked the Indian neighbors of Marquette and sent them all flying eastward, like dry leaves before an October gale. The zealous Marquette accompanied them, and, with such bands as he could induce to settle around him, opened a new mission on the mainland near Mackinac Island, at the Point St. Ignace of to-day.

Meanwhile, Allouez continued his mission at De Pere, making long trips throughout Wisconsin, preaching to the Indians, and establishing the mission of St. Mark on the Wolf River, probably on or near Lake Shawano, where the Chippewas then lived in great numbers. Later, he opened St. James mission at the Mascoutin village near Berlin. His churches were mere huts or wigwams built of reeds and bark, after the manner of the natives. Another Jesuit, Louis Andr?, was sent to Wisconsin to assist this enterprising missionary, and they traveled among the tribes, preaching and healing the sick in nearly every Indian village in the wide country between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. The career of these good missionaries was not one of ease. Their lives were frequently in peril; they suffered severely from cruel treatment, hunger, cold, and the many hardships of forest travel; and were rewarded by few conversions.

Allouez remained in Wisconsin until 1676, when he departed to carry on a similar work in Illinois, dying thirteen years later, after a score of years spent in Western missions. In Wisconsin, he was succeeded, in turn, by several others of his order; chief among them were Fathers Silvy, Albanel, Nouvel, Enjalran, and Chardon. Chardon was the last of his kind, for he, with other Frenchmen, was driven out of Wisconsin in 1728, at the time of the Fox War.

SOME NOTABLE VISITORS TO EARLY WISCONSIN

It has been pointed out that wandering fur traders were in Wisconsin at a very early date. We have seen that Nicolet, Radisson, and Groseilliers made Wisconsin known to the world, at a time when Massachusetts colony was still young. It will be remembered that when Father M?nard went to Lake Superior, in 1660, to convert the Indians, there were several French fur traders with him. As early as the spring of 1662, these same traders had gone across country to the mouth of the Fox River. Three years later the Menominees and Pottawattomies, then living on both sides of the bay, were visited by Nicolas Perrot, a daring young spirit from Quebec, who had come to the then Far West to make his fortune in trading with the red men.

Perrot was one of the most picturesque characters in Wisconsin history. In Canada he had been a servant of the Jesuit missionaries, acquiring in this work an education which was slight as to books, but broad as to knowledge of the Indians and of forest life. He was now twenty-one years of age, and started out for himself as soon as he was his own master. For five years Perrot wandered up and down the eastern half of Wisconsin, frequently visiting his friends, the Mascoutins and Miamis, on the Fox River. He smoked pipes of peace with them and with other forest and prairie tribes, and joined in their feasts of beaver, dog, and other savage delicacies.

In 1670 he and four other Frenchmen, packing their furs into bundles of convenient size, joined a large party of Indians going down to Montreal in canoes, to trade. Perrot did not return with his companions, but visited Quebec, and there received an appointment from the government to rally the Western tribes in a great council at Sault Ste. Marie. Here a treaty was to be made, binding the savages to an alliance with France. The French were very jealous of the English, who had, through the guidance of Radisson and Groseilliers, commenced fur trade operations in the Hudson Bay country. It was feared that they would entice the Indians of the upper Great Lakes to trade with them, for the English offered higher prices for furs than did the French.

Perrot spent the winter in visiting the tribes in Wisconsin and along the northern shores of Lakes Michigan and Huron, and succeeded in inducing large bands of them to go to the Sault early in May . The council was attended by an enormous gathering, representing tribes from all over the Northwest, even from the north shores of Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. Father Marquette was there with the Ottawas, and several other famous missionaries came to the council. The interpreter, who knew Indian dialects by the score, was no less a person than Louis Joliet. The French government was represented by Saint Lusson, who concluded the desired treaty, with great ceremony, took formal possession of all this country for the king of France, and reared on the spot a great cedar pole, to which he fastened a lead plate bearing the arms of his country. This symbol the simple and wondering savages could not understand: and as soon as the Frenchmen had gone home again, they tore it down, fearing that it was a charm which might bring bad luck to the tribesmen.

And now we find Perrot suddenly losing his office, and forced for ten years to live a quiet life in the French settlements on the lower St. Lawrence. He married a well-to-do young woman, reared a considerable family, and became a man of some influence. But he was always eager to be back in the forest, wandering from tribe to tribe, and engaging in the wilderness trade, where the profits were great, though the risks to life and property were many. In 1681 he returned to the woods, but not till three years later was he so far west as Mackinac.

In 1685 he appeared once more at Green Bay, this time holding the position of Commandant of the West, with a little company of twenty soldiers. He now had almost unlimited authority to explore and traffic as he would, for the only salary an official of that sort used to get, in New France, was the right to trade with the Indians. He had already lost money in working for the government as an Indian agent, and his present operations were wholly directed toward getting it back again. He went up the Fox and down the Wisconsin, and then ascended the Mississippi to trade with the wild Sioux tribe. For headquarters, he erected a little log stockade on the east bank of the Mississippi, about a mile above the present village of Trempealeau, and south of the mouth of Black River. In the year 1888, the site of this old stockade was discovered by a party of historical students, and many of the curious relics found there can now be seen in the museum of the State Historical Society, at Madison.

All through the winter of 1685-86, Perrot traded here with the Sioux. He had a most captivating manner of treating Indians; for a long time, few of them ventured to deny any request made by him. Chiefs from far and near would come to the Trempealeau "fort," as it was called, and hold long councils and feasts with the great white chief, and more than once he was subjected to the curious Sioux ceremony of being wept over. A chief would stand over his guest and weep copiously, his tears falling upon the guest's head; when the chief's tear ducts were exhausted, he would be relieved by some headman of the tribe, who in turn was succeeded by another, and so on until the guest was well drenched. This must have been a very trying experience to Perrot, but he was shrewd enough to pretend to be much pleased by it.

Several other forts were built by Perrot along the Mississippi, none of them more than groups of stout log houses. These were surrounded by a stockade wall of heavy logs well planted in the ground, sharpened at the top, pierced for musket fire, and sometimes surmounted by a small cannon. The stockade whose ruins were unearthed at Trempealeau, measured about forty-five by sixty feet. One of his stockades, Fort Perrot, was on the Minnesota shore of Lake Pepin; still another, Fort St. Nicholas, was near the "lower town" of the Prairie du Chien of to-day, at the confluence of the Wisconsin and the Mississippi; and it also appears that he had a stockade lower down the Mississippi, to guard a lead mine which he had discovered near Galena, because lead was an important article for both fur traders and Indians. Sometimes traders fought among themselves, for the possession of a lead mine.

Perrot made frequent voyages to the settlements on the St. Lawrence River, and engaged in some of the French expeditions against the hostile Iroquois of New York. While, on the whole, he was successful in holding the Western tribes in friendship to New France, his position was not without grave perils. One time his old friends, the Mascoutins, rose against him, claiming that he had killed one of their warriors. The claim may have been true, for he was a man of violent temper, and ruled the Wisconsin forests after the despotic fashion of an Asiatic prince. The Mascoutins captured Perrot, in company with a Pottawattomie chief, and carrying them to their village, robbed the commandant of all his furs, and decided to burn the prisoners at the stake. But while being conducted to the fire, the two managed by artifice to escape, and at last reached in safety their friends at the mouth of the Fox River. Another time, the Miamis captured Perrot, and would have burned him except for the interference of the Fox Indians, with whom he was friendly.

In 1699, owing to the uprising of the Foxes, the king ordered that all the Western posts be abandoned, and their little garrisons removed to Montreal and Quebec. Thus suddenly ended the career of Perrot, who returned a poor man, for his recent losses in furs had been heavy, and his expenses of keeping up the posts large. Again and again he sought redress from the government, and the Wisconsin Foxes earnestly pleaded that he be sent back to them, as "the best beloved of all the French who have ever been among us." But his star had set, he no longer had influence; and it had just been decided to punish his friends the Foxes. Perrot lived about twenty years longer, on the banks of the Lower St. Lawrence, and died in old age, like Joliet, in neglect and poverty.

Another famous visitor to Wisconsin, in those early days, was Pierre le Sueur, who in 1683 traveled from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, over the Fox-Wisconsin route, and traded with the Sioux at the Falls of St. Anthony and beyond. His fur trade grew, in a few years, to large proportions; for he was a shrewd man, and was related to some of the officials of New France. This enabled him to secure trading licenses for the Western country, and other valuable privileges, which gave him an advantage over the unlicensed traders, like Duluth, who had no official friends. In 1693, Le Sueur was trading in Duluth's old country; and, in order to protect the old Bois Brul? and St. Croix route from marauding Indians, he built a log fort at either end, one on Chequamegon Bay, and the other on an island in the Mississippi, below the mouth of the St. Croix. A few years later, Le Sueur was in France, where he obtained a license to operate certain "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth," which he claimed to have discovered along the banks of the Upper Mississippi. In the summer of 1700, he and his party opened lead mines in the neighborhood of the present Dubuque and Galena, and also near the modern town of Potosi, Wisconsin. He does not appear to have been very successful as a miner; but his fur trade was still enormous, and his many explorations led to the Upper Mississippi being quite correctly represented on the maps of America, made by the European geographers.

A missionary priest, Father St. Cosme, of Quebec, was in Green Bay in October, 1699, and proposed to visit the Mississippi region, by way of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers. But the warlike Foxes, who were giving the French a great deal of trouble at this time, had forbidden any white man passing over this favorite waterway, so St. Cosme was obliged to go the way that La Salle had followed, up the west shore of Lake Michigan and through Illinois. The party stopped at many places along the Wisconsin lake shore, but the only ones which we can identify are the sites of Sheboygan and Milwaukee, where there were large Indian villages.

A QUARTER OF A CENTURY OF WARFARE

Wisconsin was important, from a geographical point of view, because here were the meeting places of waters which flowed in so many directions; here were the gates which opened upon widely divergent paths. The explorer and the fur trader soon discovered this, and Wisconsin became known to them at a very early period. France had two important colonies in North America, New France , upon the St. Lawrence River, and Louisiana, extending northward indefinitely from the Gulf of Mexico. It was found necessary, in pushing her claim to the ownership of all of the continent west of the Alleghany Mountains and east of the Rockies, to connect New France and Louisiana with a chain of little forts along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The forts at Detroit, Mackinac, Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and Kaskaskia were links in this chain, at the center of which was Wisconsin; or, to use another figure, Wisconsin was the keystone of the arch which bridged the two French colonies.

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