it and when it boyles one houre or two ye rind or skin comes off with ease, which we take and drie it in the smoake and then reduce it into powder betwixt two graine-stoans, and putting the kettle with the same watter uppon the fire, we make [of] it a kind of broath, which nourished us, but becam thirstier and drier than the wood we eat.

"The 2 first weeke we did eate our doggs. As we went back uppon our stepps for to gett anything to fill our bellyes, we weare glad to get the boans and carcasses of the beasts that we killed. And happy was he that could gett what the other did throw away after it had been boyled 3 or four times to gett the substance out of it. We contrived another plott, to reduce to powder those boanes, ye rest of crows and doggs. So [we] putt all that together halfe foot within grounde, and so makes a fire uppon it. We covered all that very well with earth, soe feeling the heat, and boyled them againe, and [they] gave more froth than before; in the next place the skins that weare reserved to make us shoose, cloath, and stokins, yea, most of the skins of our cottages. We burned the haire on the coats; the rest goes downe throats, eating heartily these things most abhorred. We went so eagerly to it that our gumms did bleede like one newly wounded. The wood was our food the rest of [that] sorrowfull time. Finaly we became the very Image of death. We mistook ourselves very often, taking the living for the dead and ye dead for living. We wanted strength to draw the living out of cabans, or if we did when we could, it was to putt them four paces in the snow."

*

At last, with five hundred of the savages dead of starvation, "the wrath of God [began] to appease itselfe." The weather changed and the snow became hard enough to support the weight of a man, while the deer with their sharp hoofs sank in it. Numbers of them were taken, and the famine-stricken savages gorged themselves with food. A delegation of Sioux now came among them bearing presents of corn and other grain, and in the course of much feasting and palavering a great council was arranged for, at which the Frenchmen met a large concourse of Sioux belonging to many different bands, and formally took them under French protection. "Ye are masters over us," said one of the chiefs in welcoming the white men, "Dead or alive you have the power over us, and may dispose of us as your pleasure." The detailed description which Radisson gives of the manners and conduct of the Sioux constitutes our earliest information about this tribe which has played so large a role in the history of the Northwest.

From this excursion far within the boundaries of modern Minnesota, Groseilliers and Radisson returned some time in the spring to Chequamegon. From here they crossed the lake and spent some time

among the Cree, in the general vicinity of the city of Duluth. Returning, apparently, to Chequamegon, they persuaded a great concourse of natives to make the journey to Quebec. Before they had gone far an Iroquois alarm filled the nations with fear and caused the Cree contingent to give over the expedition. The other bands persevered, how-ever, and for the second time the daring traders swept down the Ottawa. in company with a great flotilla of canoes laden with beaver skins for the European market. "It was a great satisfaction," says Radisson,. "to see so many boats, and so many that never had before commerce with ye ffrench." But instead of the welcome to which they looked forward, the brothers encountered at Quebec a hostile reception.. Groseilliers was imprisoned for having dared to depart on his journey without the governor's permission, and a ruinous fine was levied against the furs the two men had been instrumental in securing. The momentous consequences of this treatment we have already noted. The brothers transferred their services to the English and under the patronage of these vigorous rivals of France were instrumental in founding the Hudson's Bay Company. The story of their later fortunes is interesting enough but it does not directly concern the history of Wisconsin.

Through the enterprise of Jean Nicolet and the brothers Radisson: and Groseilliers, a rift had been made in the obscurity which for ages had shrouded the land of Wisconsin from the gaze of civilization. Two of the greatest motives which animate the souls of men, the lust of wealth and the desire for political dominion, had combined to lead these first white adventurers into the Northwest. Groseilliers and Radisson had found there, in the fur trade with the natives, an abundant source of wealth, one on which the prosperity of New France had already come to depend. Commercial expansion has ever been the fruitful source of political rivalry, and over the control of the Indian trade,. whose possibilities these obscure wanderers in the wilderness had so startlingly demonstrated, England and France waged a duel of a hundred years' duration. To the motives of commercial gain and political control, whose operation was responsible for the beginnings of white exploration of Wisconsin, was early joined that great factor in the life of mankind, religious exploitation. Hard on the heels of the trader came the religious zealot, cheerfully undergoing every hardship and defying every peril that he might carry to the benighted heathen the consolation of the Gospel. That the red man frequently regarded

7 At this point in the journal Radisson interjects an account of a journey to Hudson Bay, prolonging thereby, the stay in the interior another year. It is generally believed by students that this part of the narrative is a fiction, invented for the purpose of furthering: the interests of the narrator with his English patrons.

with indifference, or even met with manifestations of lively hostility, the labors of the missionary in his behalf counted for nought. The story of the early missionary activities in the Northwest to which we must now give attention is as thrilling and remarkable as any in human history.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The works of Champlain have been published in numerous editions, and several biographies have appeared. Practically all that is known of Jean Nicolet is contained in Father Vimont's brief narrative in the Jesuit Relations of 1642 (Thwaites ed., XXIII, 275-79. See also, for incidental mention, Vol. XVIII, 233, 237.). On this slender foundation a number of more or less extensive secondary narratives have been developed which in the judgment of the present writer are practically wholly unfounded. The more notable of these discussions are: Consul W. Butterfield, History of the Discovery of the Northwest by Jean Nicolet in 1634 (Cincinnati, 1881); and Reuben G. Thwaites, "The Coming of Nicolet," in his Wisconsin, the Americanization of a French Settlement (New York, 1908).

The principal source of information for the expeditions of Groseilliers and Radisson in the Northwest is contained in the journals of the latter, first published by the Prince Society of Boston in 1885. Some incidental information on the subject is given in the Jesuit Relations for 1656 and 1660. Although Groseilliers had been for years a lay assistant of the Jesuits, some rivalry apparently developed later between him and them, and the reports of the religious order sedulously refrain from mentioning the names of the two brothers when referring to their exploits. Radisson did not hesitate, in compiling his journals, to make extravagant claims concerning the explorations which were carried on by himself and Groseilliers, and many recent commentators have expended much ingenuity on the problem of determining, from the journals, precisely where the two men went. The assertion that they discovered the upper Mississippi years in advance of Jolliet and Marquette is probably valid; but Radisson nowhere mentions the great river in terms that are susceptible of definite understanding, and it seems idle to attempt to fix upon the precise place or time of such discovery. Furthermore, since they carried over to the English what knowledge they had gained, and the journals of Radisson were unpublished for over two centuries, the fact that they probably visited the Mississippi in their wanderings does not detract from the credit due Jolliet and his companion as its discoverers.

CHAPTER IV

CRUSADERS OF THE CROSS

Strange are the workings of Providence in the heart of sinful man, and nowhere may one find them more strangely exemplified than in the career of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. At the siege of Pampeluna in the spring of 1521 a French artilleryman discharged his gun and thereby all unknowingly altered the further course of world history. The cannon-ball in its flight collided with the leg of a young Spanish officer, inflicting on him grievous wounds from which he was long in recovering. The confinement afforded opportunity for reading and reflection, with the consequence that from a professional soldier with worldly aims and a free and easy moral code, Loyola was transformed into a religious zealot of the extremest type, whose life henceforth was wholly devoted to the service of God and the Holy Church.

But thousands of religious zealots both before and since Loyola's time have lived out their lives without influencing in any perceptible way the course of human history. That Loyola succeeded in doing so, was due to the cleverness with which he met and solved what seemed to him the crying need of the church in his time. An Augustinian monk of Germany, one Martin Luther, had begun, shortly before the cannonball had terminated Loyola's military career, the movement known to history as the Protestant Reformation. Whatever its merits or demerits (a subject over which opinions still differ sharply), none can question that it shook the power of the church to its foundation, rending asunder, apparently for all time, the universal organization which through many centuries of painful effort had been built up under the leadership of the Bishops of Rome. Loyola, viewing the contemporary scene of civil dissension and warfare with the eyes of a professional soldier, conceived the idea of forming a new religious order, dependent only on the pope himself, which should be wielded by its general as the militant arm of the church. The result was the Society of Jesus, which became one of the chief agencies of the Counter-Reformation. Its members, sworn to chastity, poverty, and obedience to their superiors, were subjected to a long and arduous course of training, whose object was to divorce them completely from all local ties and individual interests, and animate them with a fiery zeal for the ad

vancement of the interests of the order to which their lives had been dedicated. Unlike the older religious orders, it was the intention of the founder of the Society of Jesus that its members should live in intimate contact with the world, and their training was designed to qualify them to mix with men and exercise an influence over them. In the century following the founding of the order its devotees went out to the ends of the earth-to China, Japan, and India as well as to North and South America-eagerly encountering every conceivable privation and peril to the end that the sway of Christ and the Order might become universal.

Thus the cannon fired at Pampeluna in the spring of 1521 led to the writing, more than a century later, of an interesting chapter in the history of Wisconsin and the Northwest. The first extension of French activity beyond the region of the lower St. Lawrence was into the country occupied by the Huron tribes. This, oftentimes referred to as Huronia, lay north of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and east and south of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Through Huronia, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, the French found their way to the Great Lakes and the Northwest. Missionary activity went hand in hand with commercial and political exploitation, and as early as 1615 the Huron mission was founded by members of the Recollect order. Ten years later, the Recollects called the Jesuits to their aid, and in 1632, when the English occupation of Canada ceased the Jesuits, more powerful than the Recollects, were given entire charge of the mission. Until it came to an end through the destruction of the Huron by the Iroquois in 1649 and 1650, the Huron mission constituted the vantage ground wherein the missionaries schooled themselves for the greater task before them, and gradually acquired the knowledge of the native habits and languages which was the indispensable preliminary to the further extension of their work. In 1639 the station of Ste. Marie was established on the Wye River in modern Ontario, and from this center efforts were made to extend the activities of the missionaries to other and more distant tribes. In the autumn of 1641 occurred a great assemblage of 2,000 savages, members of many tribes, on the shore of Lake Huron to celebrate the feast of the dead. The missionaries attended this gathering as a matter of course, and among the strange tribesmen whose acquaintance they made was a band whose members had come from the outlet of Lake Superior into Lake Huron, a hundred leagues or more away. The Jesuits made friends with them and were rewarded with an invitation to accompany them back to their home. It was accepted, and two of the fathers, Isaac Jogues and Charles Raymbault, returned with the savages, naming the rapids by which the waters of Lake Superior descend to Lake Huron in honor of their Huron mis