Radisson and his brother-in-law first spent some time trying to interest merchants in Nova Scotia, then under British control, in establishing a fur trading post on Hudson’s Bay. An expedition did set out in an English ship but the captain turned back on encountering ice floes, due to the lateness of the season. Then the Frenchmen went to Boston, where they gained considerable interest in their project but not enough capital to launch it. Finally, in England, they obtained sufficient backing from Prince Rupert, cousin of King Charles II, to finance such a costly adventure.
In 1668 a trading post was established “at the bottom of Hudson’s Bay,” in the southernmost part of James Bay, and the first cargo of furs to arrive in England was magnificent enough to insure a royal charter. The king granted domain over all the vast area drained by waters flowing into Hudson’s Bay to Prince Rupert and seventeen associates, incorporating them in 1670 as the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading in Hudson’s Bay.” These merchant adventurers became virtual rulers over “Rupert’s Land,” approximately 1,400,000 square miles of territory, and so their successors of the Hudson’s Bay Company were to be for over 200 years.
After the English became entrenched on Hudson’s Bay, furs were diverted to them that otherwise would have been collected by the French. In time French traders became aggravated enough to make repeated attacks on the rival posts. Attempts to dislodge the English from the bay proved futile however. Although the “Honorable Company,” as the Hudson’s Bay Company was to become known, moved ponderously at times due to its conservative absentee directorship in England, it managed to endure and to expand at the expense of the French. In fact, it was destined to become the world’s largest fur trading organization. It would shift the course of trade to London, to make it the center of the western world’s fur market.
Meanwhile, the adventurous French were spurred on by the discovery of the upper Mississippi. Radisson called the Mississippi, in conjunction with the Missouri, the Forked River “because it has two branches, the one towards the west, the other towards the south, which we believe runs toward Mexico.” Jesuit priests, probing the hinterland, wrote that the savages assured them the Mississippi was “so noble a river that, at more than three hundred leagues’ distance from its mouth, it is larger than the one flowing before Quebec; for they declare it is more than a league wide.... Some warriors of this country, who tell us that they have made their way thither, declare that they saw there men resembling the French, who were splitting trees with long knives, and that some of them had houses on the water—for they thus expressed themselves in speaking of sawed boards and Ships”—and Spaniards!
Already, young Louis XIV had considered occupying the mouths of continental rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico to threaten the Spanish possessions there. If Radisson’s Forked River was really one of these waterways, the strategic value of such a move would be immensely enhanced. It would provide a backside approach from New France, an interior line of communications safe from Spanish attack. It was an intriguing prospect, to say the least.
Then, in 1673, a fur trader and mine prospector named Louis Joliet together with a Jesuit priest, Father Jacques Marquette, descended the Mississippi far enough to learn that it assuredly did flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Whereupon the French not only tasted the stimulating prospect of threatening Spanish possessions there, they excitedly envisioned an inland empire of trading citadels stretching from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, to the Gulf of Mexico. The continent would be theirs, with great ports of entry at the distantly separated mouths of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers. The English colonies would be completely encircled—to be pinned down on the coast, or eliminated!
Chief among those who developed this grand commercial strategy for dominion over the heart of America was Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, who as Commandant of Fort Frontenac at the western outlet of Lake Ontario had built up a thriving trade with the northwestern savages. Much to the annoyance of the Iroquois he furnished these Algonquin tribes with guns, powder and lead, as well as less deadly goods, in return for their furs. La Salle’s profits from this commerce were huge. But he was an eager young man. The prospect of an enormous trade for buffalo hides, deerskins, beaver, bear, otter and raccoon in the Mississippi valley beckoned him to conquest. In 1678, on his promise to King Louis that he would Christianize the natives, establish a line of forts from the lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi and open a direct route to France through the Gulf of Mexico, he was granted a monopolistic trade patent to all the lands drained by the mighty river.
It was to be four years however before La Salle reached the mouth of the Mississippi, even on an initial exploratory expedition, for he was to make one false start after another.
If the Iroquois had been unhappy before, they were more so when La Salle, entering into his new domain, palisaded a trading post called Fort Crevecouer—the present site of Peoria, Illinois. They almost annihilated the Illinois with whom the Frenchmen were trading there, this being one of the tribes over which the Five Nations maintained their tyrannous lordship. Henri de Tonti, La Salle’s lieutenant in command of the fort at the time these human tigers descended on their vassals, was given the choice of being burned along with some Illinois captives or departing forthwith. He chose to depart. Curiously enough, however, not without a superb stock of furs for his inconvenience, all provided for him with typical savage capriciousness.
There were other opponents with whom La Salle had to contend during this period of trial. Jesuit priests, who drove a profitable trade for beaver among the savages while saving souls, objected not only to the monopoly granted La Salle but to the Franciscan priests who accompanied him and who competed in both commercial and spiritual fields. And there were still others who made mischief. Coureurs des bois, those renegade Frenchmen trading in the wilderness without license and illegally selling their furs to the English at Albany, were not averse to conspiring against the new monopoly that threatened their independence. There were hundreds of these savage-like white men, some originally of the French petty nobility, living among the Indians. Many of them had squaw wives, no consciences and little compunction about stirring up a war against their own countrymen if it fattened their pocketbooks.