37 (page [page 49]).—Jacques Porlier, a leading fur-trader, and chief justice of Brown County court. He was a business partner of Augustin Grignon.
38 (page [page 52]).—The Sacs and Foxes maintained an important confederacy for about a hundred years, reaching between the routing of the Foxes by the French, in the first third of the eighteenth century, and the decimation of the Sacs by the Americans in the Black Hawk War (1832).
39 (page [page 52]).—This is incorrect. The French popularly called the Winnebagoes “Puants” (stinkards), a term long supposed to be a literal translation of Winepegou, the name given this tribe by its neighbors. But later investigation proves that Winepegou meant “men from the fetid water,” or “the fetids.” At first, these people were called by the French, “Tribe of the Sea,” because it was thought that salt-water must be meant by the term “fetid.” As the continent was not then thought to be as wide as it has since proved to be, the early French inferred that the Winnebagoes must live on or near the ocean, and might be Chinese. When Champlain sent Jean Nicolet to make a treaty with the Winnebagoes, he equipped the latter with an ambassadorial costume suitable for meeting mandarins. Nicolet was much disappointed to find them at Green Bay, merely naked savages. Baye des Puans (or Puants) was the French name for Green Bay, until well into the eighteenth century. It is now thought that the Winnebagoes came to Wisconsin from the Lake Winnipeg region, and obtained their name from sulphur springs in the neighborhood of which they had lived. They are an outcast branch of the Dakotan stock.
40 (page [page 54]).—Alexander Seymour Hooe was born in Virginia, and graduated from West Point Military Academy in 1827. At the time of Mrs. Kinzie’s visit, he was a first lieutenant in the Fifth Infantry; he was made a captain in July, 1838. In 1846 he was brevetted major for gallant and distinguished conduct at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, and died December 9, 1847.
41 (page [page 57]).—Pierre Paquette, local agent of the American Fur Company, and government interpreter. He was a French half-breed, and attained wide reputation because of his enormous strength and his almost despotic control over the Winnebagoes, to whom he was related.
42 (page [page 59]).—Reference is here made to Jefferson Davis, at this time second lieutenant in the First Infantry.
43 (page [page 60]).—This portage was the one used by Joliet and Marquette in their expedition towards the Mississippi in 1673, and thereafter persistently followed as one of the chief pathways to the Mississippi, by French, English, and Americans in turn, until the decline of the fur trade, about 1840. A government canal now connects the two rivers at this point; but it is seldom used, for the upper Fox is very shallow, and the Wisconsin is beset with shifting sandbars, so that few steam craft can now successfully navigate these waters, except at seasons of flood.
44 (page [page 63]).—Old Decorah (sometimes called “Grey-headed” Decorah, or De Kauray) was a village chief of the Winnebagoes, who served in the British campaign against Sandusky in 1813. At the time of his death, soon after Mrs. Kinzie’s visit, he was popularly alleged to be one hundred and forty-three years old.
45 (page [page 64]).—Robert A. Forsyth, an army paymaster, long engaged in the Indian department. He died October 21, 1849.