By 1668 many missions were strung along the waterways. The Island was the centre of a thriving trade, had thirty native villages, and a palisaded enclosure for defence, and a year later its shores were hallowed by the feet of "The Guardian Angel of the Ottawa Mission," Father Jacques Marquette.

[SUGAR LOAF ROCK, MACKINAC ISLAND.]

Here, in what he called "the home of the fishes," and "the playground of all the winds of heaven," he spent the hard winter of 1669-70, going later to the first Fort Michilimackinac, at St. Ignace, where he built a log-and-bark chapel, and whence he wrote the letters which reflect his pure spirit, as a clear pool reflects a star. Ever alert, ever anxious, "Ad Majoram Gloriam Dei," to hear of new countries to be brought to Him, his great opportunity came when the tribes trooped past the Island on their way to the Sault Ste. Marie and the Great Congress, convened on the 14th of June, 1671, by the hardy Perrot. The French wanted to control the frontier trade; the Indians wished a market for their furs. To both peoples pomp and ceremony were natural and dear, so here, in all the splendor of war-paint and wampum, tomahawk, calumet, feathers, bows and arrows, and handsome furs came the braves of many tribes; in all the gay accoutrement of blanket-surtout, scarlet cap, fringed elk-skin leggins, rifle, and dagger-decked sash came the coureurs des bois and the voyageurs; in the dignity of their uniforms came a handful of soldiers; with cross and cassock came the priests, to gather under a great wooden cross, to which the arms of France had been nailed, where, by a procès verbal, the overlordship of the Great West was assumed by Louis XIV.

Among the representatives of so many scattered savages, Father Marquette doubtless made the inquiries about and gained the knowledge concerning the Great Unknown River which served him in such good stead when, on the 17th of May, 1673, he started with Louis Joliet, five voyageurs, and in two canoes, on the voyage which made the Mississippi known to Europe. Of the honor coming from the discovery the good father never thought, but only with joy of new lands to which the message of the Cross could be carried. It is the story of a hero, the story of his short life and of his triumphant death, "alone, a Jesuit, and a Missionary," beside an obscure creek on the Michigan shore, on the 19th of May, 1675, in the eight-and-thirtieth year of his age. Descendants of his Ottawas and his Hurons still tell of his "bright hair, like the sun," and of the great funeral when, two years after his death, his body was brought back to St. Ignace. Whether the dust now held sacred was his or no, is of little moment. In the Book of Life, above and below, the name of Jacques Marquette has long been written, and like the blessing of peace his spirit rests upon the Northland.

In 1679, the Griffin, a little ship of sixty tons, took Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, and the garrulous, mendacious Recollet friar, Hennepin, past the Island on their way to the Great River, which they were to explore to the Gulf, and beside which the murdered body of the great Norman was to be flung. He only touched the Island, but the touch of La Salle was a royal accolade.

In 1688, La Honton, a soldier of unusual sagacity, noted the importance of the site, and in 1695 M. de la Motte Cadillac says that the fort, with its garrison of two hundred soldiers, and the village of Canadians and Indians to the number of six or seven thousand souls, made it one of the largest posts in Canada. Disputes between the commandant and the Jesuits, chiefly about the sale of liquor to the Indians, resulted in the discouragement of the priests, who, in 1705, burned their chapel and their school, and went back to Quebec. St. Ignace was then gradually abandoned for a second Michilimackinac on the southern peninsula.

[THE OLD BLOCKHOUSE (1780) OVERLOOKING THE LAKE.]

When the French and English war was ended on the Plains of Abraham, George III. became indeed sovereign of the soil of Canada, but Louis XV. was lord of the hearts of too many French, half-breeds, and Indians to make the transfer of allegiance easy. Loves and hates and racial sympathies are not matters for cold diplomacy, and the people of the Northwest waited longingly for a leader who should give them again the light-hearted, friendly rule of the French, under which they had been far happier than they found themselves as subjects of the stern, alien English. In the person of an Ottawa chieftain, the most remarkable personage produced by the Indian race, the leader was found. In the brain of Pontiac, grim, far-seeing, fearless, heroic, there arose as a prophetic vision the assurance that English encroachments upon the rights of his people would never cease so long as they held a rod of ground coveted by an English eye. To avert the evils he foresaw, he planned the capture of all forts west of Niagara, the extermination of all English settlers, and the restoration to the Great Father at Versailles of the lands he had just lost. With incredible swiftness he formed the vast conspiracy whose story has been told, once for all, in the living pages of Parkman's narrative.

["OLD STONE QUARTERS," FORT MACKINAC, 1780.]

Whisperings of coming trouble had been heard at Fort Michilimackinac by Major Etherington, the commandant, but none of so serious a nature as to prevent the presence of the soldiery at a great game of baggatiway which was to be played in a field near the fort by rival companies of Sacs and Chippewas, in honor of the King's birthday, August 4, 1763. The game is a very intricate and brilliant one, requiring great agility and skill, and the participation of a large number of players. As was most natural, the excitement of the onlookers was intense, and when an apparently stray ball flew high over the palisades of the unprotected fort (which had been silently invaded by a crowd of squaws with weapons hidden under their blankets) and at least four hundred players in hot pursuit swarmed over the stockade, nothing was thought amiss, until the cries appropriate to the game changed into the war-whoop, and a massacre began. Of the English, all were either killed or made captive, except Alexander Henry, whose narrative curdles the blood even yet.