Another famous visitor to Wisconsin, in those early days, was Pierre le Sueur, who in 1683 traveled from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, over the Fox-Wisconsin route, and traded with the Sioux at the Falls of St. Anthony and beyond. His fur trade grew, in a few years, to large proportions; for he was a shrewd man, and was related to some of the officials of New France. This enabled him to secure trading licenses for the Western country, and other valuable privileges, which gave him an advantage over the unlicensed traders, like Duluth, who had no official friends. In 1693, Le Sueur was trading in Duluth's old country; and, in order to protect the old Bois Brulé and St. Croix route from marauding Indians, he built a log fort at either end, one on Chequamegon Bay, and the other on an island in the Mississippi, below the mouth of the St. Croix. A few years later, Le Sueur was in France, where he obtained a license to operate certain "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth," which he claimed to have discovered along the banks of the Upper Mississippi. In the summer of 1700, he and his party opened lead mines in the neighborhood of the present Dubuque and Galena, and also near the modern town of Potosi, Wisconsin. He does not appear to have been very successful as a miner; but his fur trade was still enormous, and his many explorations led to the Upper Mississippi being quite correctly represented on the maps of America, made by the European geographers.
A missionary priest, Father St. Cosme, of Quebec, was in Green Bay in October, 1699, and proposed to visit the Mississippi region, by way of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers. But the warlike Foxes, who were giving the French a great deal of trouble at this time, had forbidden any white man passing over this favorite waterway, so St. Cosme was obliged to go the way that La Salle had followed, up the west shore of Lake Michigan and through Illinois. The party stopped at many places along the Wisconsin lake shore, but the only ones which we can identify are the sites of Sheboygan and Milwaukee, where there were large Indian villages.
It is not to be supposed that these were all the Frenchmen to tarry in or pass through Wisconsin during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Doubtless there were scores, if not hundreds of others, fur traders, voyageurs, soldiers, and priests; we have selected but a few of those whose movements were recorded in the writings of their time. Wisconsin was a key point in the geography of the West; here were the interlaced sources of rivers flowing north into Lake Superior, east and northeast into Lake Michigan, and west and southwest into the Mississippi River. The canoe traveler from Lower Canada could, with short portages, pass through Wisconsin into waters reaching far into the interior of the continent, even to the Rocky Mountains, the lakes of the Canadian Northwest, and the Gulf of Mexico. This is why the geography of Wisconsin became known so early in the history of our country, why Wisconsin Indians played so important a part on the stage of border warfare, and why history was being made here at a time when some of the States to the east of us were still almost unknown to white men.
A QUARTER OF A CENTURY OF WARFARE
Wisconsin was important, from a geographical point of view, because here were the meeting places of waters which flowed in so many directions; here were the gates which opened upon widely divergent paths. The explorer and the fur trader soon discovered this, and Wisconsin became known to them at a very early period. France had two important colonies in North America, New France (or Canada), upon the St. Lawrence River, and Louisiana, extending northward indefinitely from the Gulf of Mexico. It was found necessary, in pushing her claim to the ownership of all of the continent west of the Alleghany Mountains and east of the Rockies, to connect New France and Louisiana with a chain of little forts along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The forts at Detroit, Mackinac, Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and Kaskaskia (in Illinois) were links in this chain, at the center of which was Wisconsin; or, to use another figure, Wisconsin was the keystone of the arch which bridged the two French colonies.
There were six principal canoe routes between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi: one by way of the Maumee and Wabash rivers, another by way of St. Joseph River and the Kankakee and the Illinois, another by way of the St. Joseph, Wabash, and Ohio rivers, still another by way of the Chicago River and the Illinois, and we have already seen that from Lake Superior there were used the Bois Brulé and the St. Croix routes. But the easiest of all, the favorite gateway, was the Fox-Wisconsin route, for all the others involved considerable hardship; this is why Wisconsin was so necessary to the French military officers in holding control of the interior of the continent.
Affairs went well enough so long as the French were on good terms with the warlike and crafty Fox Indians, who held control of the Fox River. But after a time the Foxes became uneasy. The fur trade in New France was in the hands of a monopoly, which charged large fees for licenses, and fixed its own prices on the furs which it bought, and on the Indian goods which it sold to the forest traders. On the other hand, the fur trade in the English colonies east of the Alleghanies was free; any man could engage in it and go wherever he would. The result was that the English, with the strong competition among themselves, paid higher prices to the Indians for furs than the French could afford, and their prices for articles which the Indians wanted were correspondingly lower than those of the French.
The Indians were always eager for a bargain; and although the French declared that those trading with the English were enemies of New France, they persisted in secretly sending trading parties to the English, who were now beginning to swarm into the Ohio valley. The Foxes, in particular, grew very angry with the French for charging them such high prices, and resented the treatment which they received at the hands of the traders from Quebec and Montreal. At one time they told Perrot that they would pack up their wigwams, and move in a body to the Wabash River or to the Ohio, and form a league with the fierce Iroquois of New York, who were friends and neighbors of the English. Had they done so, the French fur trade in the West would have suffered greatly.