CHAPTER VII.

A NEW FRANCE.

N the strait connecting Lake Superior with

ON

the lower waters of the great American system of inland seas, there is a small town lying in the territory of the present State of Michigan that possesses considerable interest, not because it has great buildings, grand scenery, or remarkable institutions, but on account of certain transactions that marked its history nearly two centuries

and a half ago. On an autumn day, in the year 1641, a birch-bark canoe containing two Frenchmen and several Indians began a voyage to the westward through Lake Nipissing and the French River into the northern part of Georgian Bay. Thence it took a course among the beautiful islands in the upper part of Lake Huron and entered the long and devious strait that connects that body of

water with Lake Superior. It stopped at a place where the broad stream passes over a fall, and when it touched the shore the passengers were cordially greeted by a company of two thousand Indians.

The Frenchmen were Jesuits, and they were inspired with religious zeal in thus travelling day after day in the frail boat; in thus venturing to distant regions among men whose very names sounded savage and whose ferocity was so great as to spread terror among all who made them their enemies. The Jesuits preached to their new friends the religion of the One God, which the Indians had never before heard; and as they were told of the still more terrible Sioux, living eighteen days' journey to the westward, beyond the Great Lake, they longed to go thither also to preach. Doubtless, they dimly saw in their imagination the future of our great West, and in some sort could make their own the words of the poet:

I hear the tread of pioneers

Of nations yet to be;

The first low wash of waves, where soon

Shall roll a human sea.

No such good fortune as they hoped awaited the two missionaries, however. One of them soon wasted away with disease, and the other, taken captive twice by other Indians, was finally killed by them. Years passed on, and, at last, after thirty revolutions of the earth in its orbit, other minds were so far filled with the same sentiments of ambition for France and of longings to see vast accessions gathered into the Church, that they made another effort to extend the sway of the great Louis the Fourteenth over the Northwest.

The Jesuit missionaries had been all this time patiently going from place to place among the different tribes. Some of them had lost their lives, and all had suffered untold hardships, for the woods furnished few of the comforts to which they had been accustomed. One of these men had actually passed up through the strait that we have mentioned before, into Lake Superior; had sailed in his frail boat by the Pictured Rocks; had searched for the copper that he had been told could be found on the shore of the sacred lake; (copper that he did not find, but which has since

been discovered and now furnishes a foundation to many American fortunes); he had crossed its waters to the site of distant Duluth, and had actually seen the savage Sioux of which others had only heard. He had heard too, of a great river that he understood to be the "Messipi." For two lonely years he had continued his explorations, living for most of the time on the southern shores of the Lake, and when he returned to Quebec it was with the determination to make real the visions of a permanent mission that his forerunners had seen only as a beautiful possibility. It was in the year 1668, that in company with another priest, he actually established the mission of St. Mary, the oldest settlement within the limits of the present State of Michigan.

Meantime, interest in the Great West had wonderfully extended, and in far-away France the King and his Cabinet were discussing the opportunity presented to them for national aggrandizement. In 1661, Colbert became the Minister who directed the policy of that country, and he re-organized the colonial affairs, giving to Canada a feudal

system, and inspiring the Intendant (the chief officer of the Crown at Quebec), with a determination to extend the boundaries of New France until they should stretch from the Atlantic to the South Sea, as the Pacific Ocean was then called, and from the lakes, through all the windings of the great rivers, to the Gulf of Mexico. The scheme was a vast one, but Colbert and the King on the other side of the sea, accustomed to measure kingdoms and realms according to European standards of size, comprehended little of its magnificence. The Intendant, who represented the royal power in Canada, Jean Talon by name, knew more fully what it meant; but it was the Jesuit missionaries who had actually travelled through portions of the region, who best realized its grandeur, as well as the dangers and difficulties it involved.

Let us

now see how Talon went to work to carry out the plans made in Paris by Louis the Fourteenth and his minister, Colbert. His chief work seems to have been to select the proper person to lead the expedition that he proposed to send out, and this he did with more promptness than