ortal fame of being a first explorer. Nicolet had gone only as far
as Green Bay and Fox River; Jogues not far beyond the Sault. What
secrets lay in the Great Unknown? Year after year young Frenchmen,
fired with the zeal of the explorer, joined wandering tribes of
Algonquins going up the Ottawa, in the hope of being taken beyond the
Sault. In August, 1656, there came from Green Bay two young Frenchmen
with fifty canoes of Algonquins, who told of far-distant waters called
Lake "Ouinipeg," and tribes of wandering hunters called "Christinos"
(Crees), who spent their winters in a land bare of trees (the prairie),
and their summers on the North Sea (Hudson's Bay). They also told of
other tribes, who were great warriors, living to the south,--these were
the Sioux. But the two Frenchmen had not gone beyond the Great
Lakes.[2] These Algonquins were received at Chateau St. Louis, Quebec,
with pompous firing of cannon and other demonstrations of welcome. So
eager were the French to take possession of the new land that thirty
young men equipped themselves to go back with the Indians; and the
Jesuits sent out two priests, Leonard Gareau and Gabriel Dreuillettes,
with a lay helper, Louis Boesme. The sixty canoes left Quebec with
more firing of guns for a God-speed; but at Lake St. Peter the Mohawks
ambushed the flotilla. The enterprise of exploring the Great Beyond
was abandoned by all the French but two. Gareau, who was mortally
wounded on the Ottawa, probably by a Frenchman or renegade hunter, died
at Montreal; and Dreuillettes did not go farther than Lake Nipissing.
Here, Dreuillettes learned much of the Unknown from an old Nipissing
chief. He heard of six overland routes to the bay of the North, whence
came such store of peltry.[3] He, too, like the two Frenchmen from
Green Bay, heard of wandering tribes who had no settled lodge like the
Hurons and Iroquois, but lived by the chase,--Crees and Sioux and
Assiniboines of the prairie, at constant war round a lake called
"Ouinipegouek."

[Illustration: A Cree brave, with the wampum string.]

By one of those curious coincidences of destiny which mark the lives of
nations and men, the young Frenchman who had gone with the Jesuit,
Dreuillettes, to Lake Nipissing when the other Frenchmen turned back,
was Medard Chouart Groseillers, the fur trader married to Radisson's
widowed sister, Marguerite.[4]

When Radisson came back from Onondaga, he found his brother-in-law,
Grosei