The River, for about four or five miles from the Bay, has a gentle current; after that space, till you arrive at the Winnebago Lake, it is full of rocks and very rapid. At many places we were obliged to land our canoes, and carry them a considerable way. Its breadth, in general, from the Green Bay to the Winnebago Lake, is between seventy and a hundred yards: the land on its borders very good, and thinly wooded with hickery, oak, and hazel.
The Winnebago Lake is about fifteen miles long from east to west, and six miles wide. At its south-east corner, a river falls into it that takes its rise near some of the northern branches of the Illinois River. This I called the Crocodile River, in consequence of a story that prevails among the Indians, of their having destroyed, in some part of it, an animal, which from their description must be a crocodile or an alligator.
The land adjacent to the Lake is very fertile, abounding with grapes, plums, and other fruits, which grow spontaneously. The Winnebagoes raise on it a great quantity of Indian corn, beans, pumpkins, squash, and water melons, with some tobacco. The Lake itself abounds with fish, and in the fall of the year, with geese, ducks, and teal. The latter, which resort to it in great numbers, are remarkably good and extremely fat, and are much better flavoured than those that are found near the sea, as they acquire their excessive fatness by feeding on the wild rice, which grow so plentifully in these parts.
Having made some acceptable presents to the good old queen, and received her blessing, I left the town of the Winnebagoes on the 29th of September, and about twelve miles from it arrived at the place where the Fox River enters the Lake on the north side of it. We proceeded up this river, and on the 7th of October reached the great Carrying Place, which divides it from the Ouisconsin.
The Fox River, from the Green Bay to the Carrying Place, is about one hundred and eighty miles. From the Winnebago Lake to the Carrying Place the current is gentle, and the depth of it considerable; notwithstanding which, in some places it is with difficulty that canoes can pass, through the obstructions they meet with from the rice stalks, which are very large and thick, and grow here in great abundance. The country around it is very fertile and proper in the highest degree for cultivation, excepting in some places near the River, where it is rather too low. It is in no part very woody, and yet can supply sufficient to answer the demands of any number of inhabitants. This river is the greatest resort for wild fowl of every kind that I met with in the whole course of my travels; frequently the sun would be obscured by them for some minutes together.
About forty miles up this river, from the great town of the Winnebagoes, stands a smaller town belonging to that nation.
Deer and bears are very numerous in these parts, and a great many beavers and other furs are taken on the streams that empty themselves into this river.
The River I am treating of, is remarkable for having been, about eighty years ago, the residence of the united bands of the Ottigaumies and the Saukies, whom the French had nicknamed, according to their wonted custom, Des Sacs and Des Reynards, the Sacks and the Foxes, of whom the following anecdote was related to me by an Indian.
About sixty years ago, the French missionaries and traders having received many insults from these people, a party of French and Indians under the command of Captain Morand marched to revenge their wrongs. The captain set out from the Green Bay in the winter, when they were unsuspicious of a visit of this kind, and pursuing his route over the snow to their villages, which lay about fifty miles up the Fox River, came upon them by surprize. Unprepared as they were, he found them an easy conquest, and consequently killed or took prisoners the greatest part of them. On the return of the French to the Green Bay, one of the Indian chiefs in alliance with them, who had a considerable band of the prisoners under his care, stopped to drink at a brook; in the mean time his companions went on: which being observed by one of the women whom they had made captive, she suddenly seized him with both her hands, whilst he stooped to drink, by an exquisitely susceptible part, and held him fast till he expired on the spot. As the chief, from the extreme torture he suffered, was unable to call out to his friends, or to give any alarm, they passed on without knowing what had happened; and the woman having cut the bands of those of her fellow prisoners who were in the rear, with them made her escape. This heroine was ever after treated by her nation as their deliverer, and made a chiefess in her own right, with liberty to entail the same honour on her descendants: an unusual distinction, and permitted only on extraordinary occasions.
About twelve miles before I reached the Carrying Place, I observed several small mountains which extended quite to it. These indeed would only be esteemed as molehills when compared with those on the back of the colonies, but as they were the first I had seen since my leaving Niagara, a track of nearly eleven hundred miles, I could not leave them unnoticed.