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, Larivière, 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. Larivière 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. Larivière 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 Larivière.
Three days after the loss of Larivière 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: Château 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 mêlée 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 Ménard 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.