Then, too, there was the matter of the French traders already in the northwestern hinterland. But, since England had inherited the Dutch trade with the Iroquois, those fierce savages were counted upon to act as buffer allies in the interior, to keep the French trade routes north of the lake country.
It was quite a surprise therefore to the British colonials when their penetration of the interior had hardly begun before Frenchmen were harassing their right flank. Their coastal border on the St. Croix River was forced back once more below the Penobscot, while in the interior the Mohawk valley itself was raided by French troops trying to wrest more southerly routes from the Iroquois.
And this was only the beginning of a bloody rivalry between the English and the French for fur and dominion in America, a rivalry that would keep the evershifting borders aflame for almost a hundred years—to culminate finally in the decisive French and Indian War of the eighteenth century.
The Frenchmen of the seventeenth century who followed the paths blazed by Samuel de Champlain had extended those paths farther and farther into the hinterland. Fur traders, explorers, soldiers, and Catholic priests who not infrequently bent to the paddles for discovery entirely on their own, all took part in this invasion of America.
Of course the Frenchmen who came to America were not colonizers, not true empire builders. There were few farmers among them. In the main they were adventurers. But they had grand plans, and they knew how to strike bargains and make treaties with the natives. So, although their lines of communication were much too thinly held, they kept pushing their birch-bark canoes deeper into the wilderness for trade and dominion.
In 1634, one of Champlain’s interpreters, Jean Nicollet, voyaged across the waters of Lake Michigan to establish trade with the natives in the Wisconsin region. He had supposed they would be an Oriental people, and his appearance at Green Bay in a damask gown richly embroidered in the Chinese manner impressed the Dacotahs no less than the thunder and lightning of his pistol. Believing him to be a white god, the savages were humbly acquiescent to Nicollet’s demand for skins, and he took full profit from the situation.
In another twenty-five years two intrepid fur-traders, Pierre Exprit Radisson and his sister’s husband Medard Chouart, Sieur des Grosseilliers, had looked upon the waters of the upper Mississippi River. Trading and hunting with the Sioux, they explored much of the vast country between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. On this same expedition, it would appear, while his partner was ill in winter camp, Radisson investigated the region about Lake Superior and learned of Cree trade routes from that lake to the Great Bay of the North (Hudson’s Bay). In the end, after many blood-curdling adventures, he and his brother-in-law returned home to Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence with a fortune in beaver skins.
They were soon off again, however, on another extended trading expedition, this time to build a palisaded fort among savage tribes living north of Lake Superior and eventually to cross the wilderness to Hudson’s Bay. Radisson’s account of the perils encountered on this venture puts one in mind of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece—and the tale’s denouement is no less reminiscent of that ancient Greek legend. In any case, the brothers-in-law took along a particularly fine supply of merchandise on this expedition into what is now northwestern Ontario—knives, hatchets and swords, ivory combs and tin looking-glasses, awls, and needles—all those things designed to send the red men in breathless pursuit of beaver. And, when they returned home, they had the greatest single cargo of pelts ever before seen in America. Their convoy included a great fleet of fur-laden canoes, requiring hundreds of Indians to paddle them.
Such a kingly treasure was too much for the grasping French governor at Quebec to resist. What he couldn’t take away from Radisson and Des Grosseilliers in taxes he took away in fines. This, he informed them, was because they had gone on their journey without his personal permission. The share left for the two traders, who had taken the risks, opened the country and brought back the beaver, hardly compensated them for their labor. They quit Canada in disgust to cast their lot with the English, the important consequence of which was the birth of the great Hudson’s Bay Company.