Men willing to undertake such duties, undergo such hardships, live such lives, are sure to leave their impress on any country. We shall find they did so on ours.
On their part the savages truly wished for knowledge of the white man's God, who they were told, and believed, was able to raise them up out of their lowly condition and make them rich and powerful like the whites. So much, at least, of the Jesuits' teachings they could comprehend.
No long time elapsed before these Jesuits made their way to the Hurons of the lake, and here (1634) they established their first missions.
Some say that in this same year a French trader, named Jean Nicolet,[8] made his way as far west as the Green Bay of Lake Michigan. There is hopeless confusion about the date, but none as to the fact of his being the first white man to set foot in what is now the State of Wisconsin.
When Nicolet got back to Quebec, he told the missionaries there that he had been on a river which would have taken him to the sea, had he kept on as he was going but three days longer. Hearing this story, the fathers believed themselves on the eve of no less a discovery than the long-sought outlet to India.
Although the Spaniards said little about the discoveries they were making on that side, they could not prevent some knowledge of what they were doing in New Mexico and on the Pacific from leaking out through the Jesuits who were themselves concerned in all these discoveries, and so were better informed than others in regard to their progress.
But from the year 1640, when the missionaries so certainly thought the key to the South Sea was in their hands, on to 1650, or one whole decade, the Iroquois gave the French and their allies other work to do at home. Hardly could the French consider themselves safe in their fort at Montreal, much less venture abroad upon new schemes of discovery. In vain the missionaries cried out upon the Iroquois as the great scourge of Christianity. In vain the elements were invoked to destroy them. The heathen were at the doors of their monasteries, the Dutch[9] were behind the Iroquois, urging them on, and the future of New France looked gloomy indeed.
TOTEM OF THE FOXES.