these waters, which made it a good place for a mission. The Fathers were invited to remain, but other duties obliged them to decline and to return to the Huron Mission.11

Two momentous events were soon to lead to extensive exploration in the country which Nicolet, Jogues and Raymbault had brought to the attention of white men. The first was the almost complete destruction of the missions by the Hurons,12 and the second, the dispersion of the Hurons by a final onslaught of the Iroquois, their bitterest enemies. The Hurons fled from their own country in terror, to the Manitoulins, to the Straits of Mackinac, to Lake Superior, to Green Bay, and far into the interior of the Mississippi Valley. These disasters affected the traders as well, for with the Indians gone it was necessary to follow them to their retreats to open up new fields of trade.

13

Despite the enmity of the Iroquois, which made travelling dangerous in the extreme, in 1658 two fur traders of Three Rivers passed through the Straits of Mackinac on a voyage of exploration to the West. The elder of these was Médard Chouart Groseilliers, the other his brother-in-law, Pierre Esprit Radisson, names almost unknown to history until within a few years. Not far out on their journey they defeated an attack made on their party by the Iroquois at Huron Village, on one of the lesser Manitoulins. They stopped at the Grand Manitoulin; then pushing on through the Straits of Mackinac, they landed on the shores of Green Bay, the first visit to be paid to those waters since Nicolet, a quarter of a century before.

11 For a biographical sketch of Jogues, see Jesuit Relations, IX, 313314, (The Burrows Brothers Company, Cleveland, O.) for Raymbault, Ibid., VIII, 278-279.

12 Jesuit Relations, I, 24.

18 See Wis. Hist. Colls., X, 292; and XI, 64–96.

During their explorations, undoubtedly they passed within sight of Mackinac Island. One writer,11 who has written a book on these explorers, affirms that "they passed the Island of Michilimackinac with its stone arches." They visited the Sault, coasted along the Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior, and the site of the mission to be founded by Allouez on Chequamegon Bay, exploring the lake to its western extremity, and far beyond. 15

In the volume entitled Historic Green Bay, we read: 16 "During the decade that followed the adventurous journey of Radisson and Groseilliers, two powerful agencies were at work for the advancement of European influence, in what was the far West. Commerce and religion struggled together, advancing slowly, side by side, into the heart of the new country, until in course of time, there was to be seen within every palisaded enclosure, a trader's hut and a Mission chapel, each dependent upon the other." In 1660, on the return of Radisson and Groseilliers to Montreal with a fur-laden flotilla of sixty Indian canoes, the reports of these explorers induced the sending of two missionaries to the Lake Superior country, one of whom was René Ménard, formerly a co-worker with Raymbault in the Huron missions. He was escorted thither by Groseilliers. The Mission is with much reason supposed to have been at Old Village Point, seven miles north of the present L'Anse, on Keewenaw Bay. His course thither from Montreal lay over the usual route, up the Ottawa and Mattawan rivers,

14 Laut, Pathfinders of the West, p. 112. The Macmillan Co., N. Y. 15 See for a critical survey of these explorations the excellent articles by H. C. Campbell in Parkman Club Publications, No. 2; also, the Magazine of American History for Jan., 1906; Wis. Hist. Colls., X, 292–298; Am. Hist. Rev. for Jan., 1896; and Proceedings of the Wis. Hist. Society for

16 Neville et al., Hist. Green Bay, p. 24.

across Lake Nipissing, and down French River to Georgian Bay. Thence he passed by the shore of Lake Huron to the Sault, and coasted along the southern borders of Lake Superior. A letter to a friend shows that he felt this would be his last mission. It was so. He suffered untold hardships. He was the first martyr of the Ottawa Mission, losing his life in an attempt to answer an appeal from a band of fugitive Hurons who had gathered at the head of Black River in Wisconsin.18

17

There seems to be no evidence that Ménard ever visited the vicinity of Mackinac Island, his nearest approach being the canoe trip from the Georgian Bay to the Sault. It was

(Laude Allover

FATHER ALLOUEZ' AUTOGRAPH

(From Major Dwight H. Kelton's Collection)

different with his successor, Father Claude Jean Allouez, in whose letter of 1670 there occurs the earliest known mention of the Island. Allouez succeeded to the work of Ménard in 1665, founding a mission on the shore of Chequamegon Bay, a little farther west, which he named in honour of the Holy Ghost, La Pointe de Sainte Esprit; it is the site of the present Ashland. Here he built the first chapel to be erected on the shores of Lake Superior. The Indians came from various quarters to this mission, and from Green Bay they brought reports of mistreatment by the traders. Prevailed upon to try to remedy conditions at Green Bay, Allouez reported his plans at Quebec in 1669

17 Jesuit Relations, XLVIII, 263-265. The Burrows Brothers Company, Cleveland, O.

18 Jesuit Relations, XVIII, 256.

and set out from there the same year for his new field by way of the Sault.

It was on the canoe voyage from the Sault to Green Bay that Allouez passed Mackinac Island, as he mentions in his report to Dablon in the following year. "On the third of November," he says, 19 "we departed from the Sault, I and two others. Two canoe loads of Prouteouatamies wished to conduct me to their country; not that they wished to receive instruction there, having no disposition for the faith, but that I might curb some young Frenchmen, who, being among them for the purpose of trading, were threatening and maltreating them. We arrived on the first day at the entrance to the Lake of the Hurons, where we slept under the shelter of the Islands. On the fourth, toward noon, we doubled the Cape which forms the detour, as is the beginning of the Strait or the Gulf of Lake Huron, which is well known, and of the Lake of the Illinois [Michigan] which up to the present time is unknown, and is much smaller than Lake Huron." In about a week, Allouez and his party "doubled successfully enough the Cape which makes a detour to the west, having left in our rear a large Island named Michilimackinack, celebrated among the Savages."

In the following year, 1671, we find Allouez taking part in one of the most significant events that had yet transpired in the region of the Great Lakes. The scene was at Sault Ste. Marie, where a permanent mission had been recently established under the care of Louis Nicolas. The vigilant mind of Jean Talon, Intendant of Canada, had grasped the key to the French trading interests in the interior of the

19 Jesuit Relations, LIV, 197-201. For a biographical sketch of Allouez, see Ibid., XLIV, 322.

continent, the control of the great northern waterways, and had ordered Daumont de Saint Lusson to take formal possession of the whole vast region for the crown of France. In response to messengers sent out to the various tribes, throngs of Indians had assembled at the Sault from all over the lake country, together with the French explorers, priests, traders and soldiers. On June 14, 1671, Saint Lusson with imposing ceremony, in which the cross and the royal standard figured prominently, took possession “in the name of the Most High, Mighty, and Redoubted Monarch, Louis, Fourteenth of that name, Most Christian King of France and of Navarre," of lands "both those which have been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the Seas of the North and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea." 20 When the din of acclamation had subsided, "Father Claude Allouez," says the Jesuit account,21 "began to eulogize the King, in order to make all those Nations understand what sort of a man he was whose standard they beheld, and to whose sovereignty they were that day submitting." His words were "received with wonder by those people, who were all astonished to hear that there was any man on earth so great, rich, and powerful." The ceremony ended with "a bonfire, which was lighted towards evening and around which the Te Deum was sung to thank God, on behalf of those poor peoples, that they were now the subjects of so great and powerful a Monarch."

20 The ceremony is graphically described by Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, pp. 51-55 (Little, Brown & Co., Boston) and by Channing and Lansing in The Story of the Great Lakes, pp. 40-48. (The Macmillan Co., N. Y.) See also Justin Winsor's Address, The Pageant of St. Lusson, Ann Arbor, 1892. J. Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

21 Jesuit Relations, LV, 105–115. The Burrows Brothers Company, Cleveland, O.