The Spring of 1679 found the explorers still among the prairie tribes of the Mississippi, and from them Radisson learned 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 tribe to the north, the Crees.
The two Frenchmen pressed westward, circled over the territory now known as Wisconsin, eastern Iowa and Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, and back over North Dakota and Minnesota to the north shore of Lake Superior.
Then Radisson made a snow-shoe trip towards Hudson’s Bay and back again, living on moose meat and the flesh of beaver and caribou. Finally, after adventures exciting and hair-raising, he and Groseillers found their way to Three Rivers.
Although Radisson was not yet twenty-eight years of age, his explorations into the Great Northwest had won him both fame and fortune.
So this is the way that he spent his life. Voyaging, trapping, trading, he covered all this great, wild country, paddled up her rivers, fished in her lakes, smoked the pipe of peace in her settlements. In ten years’ time he brought half a million dollars’ worth of furs to an English trading company which employed him.
Yet, with all his explorations, all his adventures, all his trading, as he grew old, he remained as poor as one of the couriers de bois who used to paddle him up the streams of New France. Until the year 1710 he drew an allowance of £50 a year ($250) from the English Hudson Bay Trading Company, then payments seemed to have stopped. Radisson had a wife and four children to support, but what happened to him, or to them, is unknown to history.
Somewhere in the vast country of New France the life of this daring adventurer went out. And somewhere in that vast possession lies the body of this, the first white man to explore the Great Northwest. Oblivion hides all record of his death, and only the cry of the moose-bird, harsh, discordant—the true call of the wilderness—echoes over the unknown spot where lie, no doubt, the bones of this trickster of the Mohawks and explorer of the wastes of New France.
Memorial tablets have been erected in many cities to commemorate La Salle, Champlain, and other discoverers. Radisson has no monument, save the memory of a valiant man-of-the-woods, reverently held in the hearts of all those who love the hemlock forests, the paddle, the pack, and the magnetic call of the wilderness.