Minnesota, the North Star State

by William Watts Folwell

In 1608 he went out in the capacity of lieutenant-governor of New France, a post occupied for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life, with the exception of a brief interval. On July 3 he staked out the first plat of Quebec. His trifling official engagements left him ample leisure to prosecute those explorations on which his heart was set; chief of them the road to China.

In 1609, to gain assistance of the Indians in his neighborhood, he joined them in a war-party to the head of the lake to which he then gave his name. A single volley from the muskets of himself and two other Frenchmen put the Iroquois, as yet unprovided with firearms, to headlong rout. Six years later he led a large force of Hurons from their homes in upper Canada between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, across Lake Ontario, to be defeated by the well-fortified Iroquois. The notes of his expedition added the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing, the French River, Lake Huron, and Lake Ontario to his map. Could Champlain have foreseen the disasters to follow for New France and the Huron nation, he would not have made the Iroquois his and their implacable enemy. He made no further journeys westward in person, but adopted a plan of sending out young men, whom he had put to school among native tribes, to learn their languages and gather their traditions and surmises as to regions yet unvisited. One of them, Etienne Brulé, who had been his interpreter on the second expedition against the Iroquois, and detached before the battle on an embassy to an Indian tribe, did not return till after three years of extensive wanderings. He showed a chunk of copper which he declared he had brought from the shore of a great lake far to the west, nine days’ journey in length, which discharged over a waterfall into Lake Huron.

In 1634 another of Champlain’s apprentices, Jean Nicollet by name, passed through the Straits of Mackinaw and penetrated to the head of Green Bay and possibly farther. He may have been at the Sault Sainte Marie. So confident was he of reaching China that he took with him a gorgeous mandarin’s robe of damask to wear at his court reception. Attired in it he addressed the gaping Winnebagoes, putting a climax on his peroration by firing his pistols. Champlain’s map of 1632 showed his conjectured Lake Michigan north of Lake Huron. Nicollet gave it its proper location.

Champlain’s stormy career closed at Christmas, 1635. The honorable title of “Father of New France” rightly belongs to him, in spite of the fact that in none of his great plans had he achieved success. He had not found the road to the Indies, the savages remained in the power of the devil, and no self-supporting settlement had been planted. Quebec’s population did not exceed two hundred, soldiers, priests, fur-traders and their dependents. There was but one settler cultivating the soil.

Exploration languished after Champlain’s death, and for a generation was only incidentally prosecuted by missionaries and traders. In 1641 two Jesuit fathers, Jogues and Raymbault, traveled to the Sault Sainte Marie, and gave the first reliable account of the great lake.

From the earliest lodgments of white men on the St. Lawrence the fur-trade assumed an importance far greater than the primitive fisheries. In the seventeenth century the fashion of fur-wearing spread widely among the wealthier people of Europe. The beaver hat had superseded the Milan bonnet. No furs were in greater request than those gathered in the Canadian forests. A chief reason for the long delay of cultivation in the French settlements was the profit to be won by ranging for furs. Montreal, founded in 1642 as a mission station, not long after became, by reason of its location at the mouth of the Ottawa, the entrepôt of the western trade. The business took on a simple and effective organization. Responsible merchants provided the outfit, a canoe, guns, powder and lead, hulled corn and tallow for subsistence, and an assortment of cheap and tawdry merchandise. Late in the summer the “coureurs des bois” set out for the wilderness. Those bound for the west traveled by the Ottawa route in large companies, for better defense against skulking Iroquois. On reaching Lake Huron, they broke up, each crew departing to its favorite haunts.

The chances for large profits naturally attracted to this primitive commerce some men of talent and ambition. In 1656 two such came down to Montreal piloting a flotilla of fifty Ottawa canoes deeply laden with precious furs. They had been absent for two years, had traveled five hundred leagues from home, and had heard of various nations, among them the “Nadouesiouek.” The author of the Jesuit Relation for the year speaks of them as “two young Frenchmen, full of courage,” and as the “two young pilgrims,” but suppresses their names. Again, in 1660 two Frenchmen reach Montreal from the upper countries, with three hundred Algonquins in sixty canoes loaded with furs worth $40,000. The journal of the Jesuit fathers gives the name of one of them as of a person of consequence, Des Groseilliers; and says of him, “Des Grosillers wintered with the nation of the Ox ... they are sedentary Nadwesseronons.”

The two Frenchmen of 1660 are now believed to have been Medard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre d’Esprit, Sieur de Radisson, both best known by their titles. The latter was the younger man, and brother to Groseilliers’ second wife. In 1885 the Prince Society of Boston printed 250 copies of the “Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson,” written by him in English. The manuscript had lain in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University for nearly two hundred years. No doubt has been raised as to its authenticity. While the accounts of the different voyages are not free from exaggerations, not to say outright fabrications, the reader will be satisfied that the writer in the main told a true story of the wanderings and transactions of himself and comrade. These two men a few years later went over to the English and became the promoters of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

If Radisson’s story be true, he and Groseilliers were the first white men to tread the soil of Minnesota. As he tells it, the two left Montreal in the month of August, 1658, and after much trouble with the “Iroquoits” along the Ottawa, reached the Sault Sainte Marie, where they “made good cheare” of whitefish. Embarking late in the same season, they went along “the most delightful and wonderous coasts” of Lake Superior, passed the Pictured Rocks, portaged over Keweenaw Point, and made their way to the head of Chequamegon Bay. Here they built a “fort” of stakes in two days, which was much admired by the wild men. Having cached a part of their goods, they proceeded inland to a Huron village on a lake believed to be Lake Courte Oreille, in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, where they were received with great ceremony. At the first snowfall the people departed for their winter hunt, and appointed a rendezvous after two months and a half. Before leaving the village the Frenchmen sent messengers “to all manner of persons and nations,” inviting them to a feast at which presents would be distributed. The best guess locates this rendezvous on or near Knife Lake, in Kanabec County, Minnesota. That was then Sioux country, and the people thereabout were long after known as Isantis or Knife Sioux, probably because they got their first steel knives from these Frenchmen. While at their rendezvous eight “ambassadors from the nation of the Beefe” (i. e. Buffalo, of course) came to give notice that a great number of their people would assemble for the coming feast. They brought a calumet “of red stone as big as a fist and as long as a hand.” Each ambassador was attended by two wives carrying wild rice and Indian corn as a present. For the feast a great concourse of Algonquin tribes gathered and prepared a “fort” six hundred paces square, obviously a mere corral of poles and brush. A “foreguard” of thirty young Sioux, “all proper men,” heralded the coming of the elders of their village, who arrived next day “with incredible pomp.” Grand councils were held, followed by feasting, dancing, mimic battles, and games of many sorts, including the greased pole. As described, this was no casual assemblage, but a great and extraordinary convocation. It lasted a fortnight.

The two Frenchmen now made seven small journeys “to return the visit of the Sioux, and found themselves in a town of great cabins covered with skins and mats, in a country without wood and where corn was grown.” The account of this six weeks’ trip is brief and indefinite. The conjecture that Groseilliers and Radisson traveled a hundred and fifty miles, more or less, into the prairie region west of the Mississippi, either by way of the Minnesota or the Crow Wing rivers, has slight support. The account may have been invented from information obtained of the Sioux at the convocation.