Leaving his new friends at Green Bay, the explorer ascended the Fox River as far as the Mascoutins, who had a village upon a prairie ridge, near where Berlin now lies. He made a similar treaty with this people, and learned of the Wisconsin River which flows into the Mississippi, but did not go to seek it. He then walked overland to the tribe of the Illinois, probably returning to Quebec, in 1635, by way of Lake Michigan. Nicolet had proceeded over nearly two thousand five hundred miles of lake, river, forest, and prairie; had been subjected to a thousand dangers from man and beast, as well as from fierce rapids and stormtossed waters; had made treaties with several heretofore unknown tribes, and had widely extended the boundaries of New France.
For various reasons, it was nearly thirty years before another visit was made by white men to Wisconsin. Nicolet himself soon settled down at the new town of Three Rivers, on the shores of the St. Lawrence, between Quebec and Montreal, as the agent and interpreter there of the great fur trade company. He was a very useful man both to the company and to the missionaries; for he had great influence over the Indians, who loved him sincerely, and he always exercised this influence for the good of the colony and of religion. He was drowned in the month of October, 1642, while on his way to release a poor savage prisoner who was being maltreated by Indians in the neighborhood.
RADISSON AND GROSEILLIERS
In the preceding chapter, the story was told how, in the year 1634, only fourteen years after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, Jean Nicolet was sent by Governor Champlain, of Quebec, all the way out to Wisconsin, to make friends with our Indians, and to induce them to trade at the French villages on the lower St. Lawrence River. Whether any of them did, as a result of this visit, go down to see the palefaces at Three Rivers or Quebec, and carry furs to exchange for European beads, hatchets, guns, and iron kettles, we do not know; there is no record of their having done so, neither are we aware that any white man soon followed Nicolet to Wisconsin.
Fur traders were in the habit of wandering far into the woods, and meeting strange tribes of Indians; sometimes they would not return to Quebec until after years of absence, and then would bring with them many canoe-loads of skins. The fur trade was under the control of the Company of the Hundred Associates. The laws of New France declared that there could be no traffic with the Indians, except what this great company approved; for they had bought from the king of France the right to do all the trading and make all the profits, and New France really existed only to make money for these rich Associates. The fur trade laws provided severe punishments for those violating them; nevertheless, although the population was small, and everybody knew everybody else in the whole country, there were many brave, daring men who traveled through the deep forests, traded with the Indians on their own account, and paid no license fees to the Associates. These men, whom an oppressive monopoly could not keep down, were the most venturesome explorers in all this vast region; they were known as coureurs des bois, or "wood rangers." La Salle, Duluth, Perrot, and many other early Western explorers, were, at times in their career, coureurs des bois.
Now, as a coureur de bois was an outlaw, because he wandered and traded without a license, naturally he was not in the habit of telling where he had been or what he had seen; then again, though brave men, few of these outlaws were educated, hence they seldom wrote journals of their travels. For these reasons, we are often obliged to depend on chance references to them, in the writings of others, and to patch up our evidence as to their movements, out of many stray fragments of information.
So far as we at present know, there were no white men in Wisconsin during the twenty years following the coming of Nicolet. It is uncertain when the next white men came upon our soil, but there is good reason to believe that it was in the autumn of 1654. These men were Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers. Like so many others in New France, they were from the northern part of old France, and came to Canada while yet lads, Groseilliers in 1641, and Radisson ten years later. In 1653, Groseilliers married a sister of Radisson, and after that the two men became inseparable companions in their long and romantic wanderings.
They experienced a number of thrilling adventures with Indians, both as traders to the forest camps of savages friendly to New France, and as prisoners in the hands of the French-hating Iroquois of New York. Nevertheless they had grown accustomed to the hard, perilous life of the wilderness, and were thoroughly in love with it. It was, as near as we can ascertain, early in the month of August, 1654, when these two adventurers started out "to discover the great lakes that they heard the wild men speak of." They followed, most of the way, in the footsteps of Nicolet, up the Ottawa River, and by the way of Lake Nipissing and French River to Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. This had now become a familiar route to the fur traders and Jesuit missionaries; but of the country west of the eastern shore of Lake Huron scarcely anything was yet known, except what vague and often fanciful reports of it were brought by the savages.