THE CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES.—With crucifixes and portable altars strapped on their backs, these brave men pushed boldly into the Indian country. Guided by the Indians, they walked through the dense forests, paddled in birch-bark canoes, and penetrated a wilderness where no white man had ever been. They built little chapels of bark near the Indian villages, and labored hard to convert the red men to Christianity. It was no easy task. Often and often their lives were in danger. Some were drowned. Some were burned at the stake. Others were tomahawked. But neither cold nor hunger, nor the dangers and hardships of life in the wilderness, could turn the priests from their good work. One of them toiled for ten years among the Indians on the Niagara River and the shores of Lake Huron; two others reached the outlet of Lake Superior; a fourth paddled in a canoe along its south shore.
[Illustration: FRENCH PRIEST AND INDIANS IN BIRCH-BARK CANOE.]
THE KING'S MAIDENS.—For fifty years after the founding of Quebec few settlers came to Canada. Then the French king sent over each year a hundred or more young women who were to become wives of the settlers. [4] Besides encouraging farming, the government tried to induce the men to engage in cod fishing and whaling; but the only business that really nourished in Canada was trading with the Indians for furs.
THE FUR TRADE.—Each year a great fair was held outside the stockade of Montreal, to which hundreds of Indians came from the far western lakes. They brought canoe loads of beaver skins and furs of small animals, and exchanged them for bright-colored cloth, beads, blankets, kettles, and knives.
[Illustration: INDIAN AND FUR TRADER.]
This great trade was a monopoly. Its profits could not be enjoyed by everybody. Numbers of hardy young men, therefore, took to the woods and traded with the Indians far beyond the reach of the king's officers. By so doing these wood rangers (coureurs de bois), as they were called, became outlaws, and if caught, might be flogged and branded with a hot iron. They built trading posts at many places in the West, and often married Indian women, which went a long way to make the Indians friends of the French. [5]
THE MISSISSIPPI.—When the priests and traders reached the country about Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, they heard from the Indians of a great river called the Mississippi—that is, "Big Water" or "Father of Waters." Might not this, it was asked, be the long-sought northwest passage to the Indies? In hopes that it was, Father Marquette (mar-ket'), a priest who had founded a mission on the Strait of Mackinac (mack'i-naw) between Lakes Huron and Michigan, and Joliet (zho-le-a'), a trapper and soldier, were sent to find the river and follow it to the sea.
[Illustration: FRENCH CLAIMS, MISSIONS, AND TRADING POSTS IN MISSISSIPPI
VALLEY IN 1700]
They started in the spring of 1673 with five companions in two canoes. Their way was from the Strait of Mackinac to Green Bay in Wisconsin, up the Fox River, across a portage to the Wisconsin River, and down this to the Mississippi, on whose waters they floated and paddled to a place probably below the mouth of the Arkansas. There the travelers stopped, and turned back toward Canada, convinced that the great river [6] must flow not to the Pacific, but to the Gulf of Mexico.
[Illustration: MARQUETTE AND JOLIET AT A PORTAGE.]