Williams's wife, an octoroon, whose portrait shows her to have been a thick-set, stolid sort of woman, died here, a year ago, and is buried hard by. The present occupants of the house are Mary Garritty, an Indian woman of sixty-five years, and her half-breed daughter, Josephine Penney, who in turn has an infant child of two. Mary was reared by the Williamses, and told us many a curious story of life at the "agency," as she called it, during the time when "Mr. Williams and Ma" were alive. Josephine, who confided to me that she was thirty years old, was regularly adopted by Mrs. Williams, for whose memory both women seem to have a very strong respect. What little personal property was left by the old woman goes to her grandchildren, intelligent and well-educated Oshkosh citizens, but Josephine has the sandy farm of sixty-five acres. She took me into the attic to exhibit such relics of the alleged dauphin as had not been disposed of by the administrator of the estate. There were a hundred or two mice-eaten volumes, mainly theological and school text-books; several old volumes of sermons,—for Eleazar is said to have considered it better taste in him to copy a discourse from an approved authority than to endeavor to compose one that would not satisfy him half as well; a boxful of manuscript odds and ends, chiefly letters, Indian glossaries and copied sermons; two or three leather-bound trunks, a copper tea-kettle used by him upon his long boat journeys, and a pair of antiquated brass candlesticks.

Then we descended to the old orchard. Mary pointed out the spot, a rod or two south of the dwelling, where Williams had his library and mission-office in a log-house that has long since been removed for firewood. In this cabin, which had floor dimensions of fifteen by twenty feet, Williams met his Indian friends and transacted business with them. Mary, in her querulous tone, said that in those days the place abounded with Indians, night and day, and as they always expected to be fed, she had her hands full attending to their wants. "There wa'n't no peace at all, sir, so long as Mr. Williams were here; when he were gone there wa'n't so many of them, an' we got a rest, which I were mighty thankful for." Garrulous Mary, in her moccasins and blanket skirt, with a complexion like brown parchment and as wrinkled,—almost a full-blood herself,—has lived so long apart from her people that she appears to have forgotten her race, and inveighed right vigorously against the unthrifty and beggarly habits of the aborigines. "I hate them pesky Indians," she cried in a burst of righteous indignation, and then turned to croon over Josephine's baby, as veritable a "little Indian boy" as I ever met with in a forest wigwam. "He's a fine feller, isn't he?" she cried, as she chucked her grandson under the chin; "some says as he looks like Mr. Williams, sir." The Doctor, who is a judge of babies, declared, in a professional tone that did not admit of contradiction, that the infant was, indeed, a fine specimen of humanity.

And thus we left the two women in a most contented frame of mind, and descended to the beach, bearing with us Josephine's parting salute, shouted from the garden gate,—"Call agin, whene'er ye pass this way!"

Depere is five miles below. The banks are bold as far as there; but beyond, they flatten out into gently sloping meadows, varied here and there by the re-approach of a high ridge on the eastern shore,—the western getting to be quite marshy by the time Fort Howard is reached.

At Depere are the first rapids of the Fox, the fall being about twelve feet. From the earliest period recorded by the French explorers, there was a polyglot Indian settlement upon the portage-trail, and in December, 1669, the Jesuit missionary Allouez established St. Francis Xavier mission here, the locality being henceforth styled "Rapide des Peres." It was from this station that Allouez, Dablon, Joliet, and Marquette started upon their memorable canoe voyages up the Fox, in search of benighted heathen and the Mississippi River. For over a century Rapide des Peres was a prominent landmark in Northwestern history. The Depere of to-day is a solid-looking town, with an iron furnace, saw-mills, and other industries; and after a long period of stagnation is experiencing a healthy business revival.

Unable to find the tender at this the last lock on our course, we portaged after the manner of old-time canoeists, and set out upon the home stretch of six miles. Green Bay, upon the eastern bank and Fort Howard upon the western, were well in view; and, it being not past two o'clock in the afternoon of a cool and somewhat cloudy day, we allowed the current to be our chief propeller, only now and then using the paddles to keep our bark well in the main current.

The many pretty residences of South Green Bay, including the ruins of Navarino, Astor, and Shanty Town, are situated well up on an attractive sloping ridge; but the land soon drops to an almost swampy level, upon which the greater portion of the business quarter is built. Opposite, Fort Howard with her mills and coal-docks skirts a wide-spreading bog, much of the flat, sleepy old town being built on a foundation of saw-mill offal. Historically, both sides of the river may be practically treated as the old "Bay Settlement" for two and a half centuries one of the most conspicuous outposts of American civilization. Here came savage-trained Nicolet, exploring agent of Champlain, in 1634, when Plymouth colony was still in swaddling-clothes. It was the day when the China Sea was supposed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes. Nicolet had heard that at Green Bay he would meet a strange people, who had come from beyond "a great water" to the west. He was therefore prepared to meet here a colony of Chinamen or Japanese, if indeed Green Bay were not the Orient itself. His mistake was a natural one. The "strange people" were Winnebago Indians. A branch of the Dakotahs, or Sioux, a distinct race from the Algonquins, they forced themselves across the Mississippi River, up the Wisconsin, and down the Fox, to Green Bay, entering the Algonquin territory like a wedge, and forever after maintaining their foothold upon this interlocked water highway. "The great water," supposed by Nicolet to mean the China Sea, was the Mississippi River, beyond which barrier the Dakotah race held full sway. As he approached, one of his Huron guides was sent forward to herald his coming. Landing near the mouth of the river, he attired himself in a gorgeous damask gown, decorated with gayly colored birds and flowers, expecting to meet mandarins who would be similarly dressed. A horde of four or five thousand naked savages greeted him. He advanced, discharging the pistols which he held in either hand, and women and children fled in terror from the manitou who carried with him lightning and thunder.

The mouth of the Fox was always a favorite rallying-point for the savages of this section of the Northwest, and many a notable council has been held here between tribes of painted red men and Jesuits, traders, explorers, and military officers. Being the gateway of one of the two great routes to the Mississippi, many notable exploring and military expeditions have rested here; and French, English, and Americans in turn have maintained forts to protect the interests of territorial possession and the fur-trade.

Here it was that a white man first set foot on Wisconsin soil; and here, also, in 1745, the De Langlades, first permanent settlers of the Badger State, reared their log cabins and initiated a semblance of white man's civilization. Green Bay, now hoary with age, has had an eventful, though not stirring history. For a hundred years she was a distributing-point for the fur-trade.

The descendants of the De Langlades, the Grignons and other colonists of nearly a century and a half standing, are still on the spot; and the gossip of the hour among the voyageurs and old traders still left among us is of John Jacob Astor, Ramsay Crooks, Robert Stuart, Major Twiggs, and other characters of the early years of our century, whose names are well known to frontier history. The creole quarter of this ancient town, shiftless and improvident to-day as it always has been, lives in an atmosphere hazy with poetic glamour, reveling in the recollection of a once festive, half-savage life, when the courier de bois and the engagé were in the ascendency at this forest outpost, and the fur-trade the be-all and end-all of commercial enterprise. Your voyageur, scratching a painful living for a hybrid brood from his meager potato patch, bemoans the day when Yankee progressiveness dammed the Fox for Yankee saw-mills, into whose insatiable maws were swept the forests of his youth, and remembers nought but the sweets of his early calling among his boon companions, the denizens of the wilderness.