[348] Guignas à Beauharnois, 29 Mai, 1728.
[349] Dépêche de Beauharnois, 1 Septembre, 1728.
[350] The best account of this expedition is that of Père Emanuel Crespel. Lignery made a report which seems to be lost, as it does not appear in the Archives.
[351] Beauharnois au Ministre, 15 Mai, 1729; Ibid., 21 Juillet, 1729.
[352] Beauharnois et Hocquart au Ministre, 2 Novembre, 1730. An Indian tradition says that about this time there was a great battle between the Outagamies and the French, aided by their Indian allies, at the place called Little Butte des Morts, on the Fox River. According to the story, the Outagamies were nearly destroyed. Perhaps this is a perverted version of the Villiers affair. (See Wisconsin Historical Collections, viii, 207.) Beauharnois also reports, under date of 6 May, 1730, that a party of Outagamies, returning from a buffalo hunt, were surprised by two hundred Ottawas, Ojibwas, Menominies, and Winnebagoes, who killed eighty warriors and three hundred women and children.
[353] Some particulars of this affair are given by Ferland, Cours d'Histoire du Canada, ii. 437; but he does not give his authority. I have found no report of it by those engaged.
[354] Relation de la Défaite des Renards par les Sauvages Hurons et Iroquois, le 28 Février, 1732. (Archives de la Marine.)
[355] The story is told in Snelling, Tales of the Northwest (1830), under the title of La Butte des Morts, and afterwards, with variations, by the aged Augustus Grignon, in his Recollections, printed in the Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society, iii.; also by Judge M. L. Martin and others. Grignon, like all the rest, was not born till after the time of the alleged event. The nearest approach to substantial evidence touching it is in a letter of Beauharnois, who writes in 1730 that the Sieur Dubuisson was to attack the Outagamies with fifty Frenchmen and five hundred and fifty Indians, and that Marin, commander at Green Bay, was to join him. Beauharnois au Ministre, 25 Juin, 1730.
[356] Mémoire sur le Canada, 1736.
[357] Charles Bodmer was the artist who accompanied Prince Maximilian of Wied in his travels in the interior of North America.