ts in
their hands. Four Indian maids carried bearskins to place on the
ground when the two explorers deigned to sit down. Inside the fort
more than six hundred councillors had assembled. Outside were gathered
a thousand spectators. As Radisson and Groseillers entered, an old
Cree flung a peace pipe at the explorers' feet and sang a song of
thanksgiving to the sun that he had lived to see "those terrible men
whose words (guns) made the earth quake." Stripping himself of his
costly furs, he placed them on the white men's shoulders, shouting: "Ye
are masters over us; dead or alive, dispose of us as you will."

Then Radisson rose and chanted a song, in which he declared that the
French took the Crees for brethren and would defend them. To prove his
words, he threw powder in the fire and had twelve guns shot off, which
frightened the Sioux almost out of their senses. A slave girl placed a
coal in the calumet. Radisson then presented gifts; the first to
testify that the French adopted the Sioux for friends; the second as a
token that the French also took the Crees for friends; the third as a
sign that the French "would reduce to powder with heavenly fire" any
one who disturbed the peace between these tribes. The fourth gift was
in grateful recognition of the Sioux' courtesy in granting free passage
through their country. The gifts consisted of kettles and hatchets and
awls and needles and looking-glasses and bells and combs and paint, but
_not_ guns. Radisson's speech was received with "Ho, ho's" of
applause. Sports began. Radisson offered prizes for racing, jumping,
shooting with the bow, and climbing a greased post. All the while,
musicians were singing and beating the tom-tom, a drum made of buffalo
hide stretched on hoops and filled with water.

Fourteen days later Radisson and Groseillers set out for the Sioux
country, or what are now known as the Northwestern states.[8] On the
third voyage Radisson came to the Sioux from the south. On this
voyage, he came to them from the northeast. He found that the tribe
numbered seven thousand men of fighting age. He remarked that the
Sioux used a kind of coke or peat for fire instead of wood. While he
heard of the tribes that used coal for fire, he does not relate that he
went to them on this trip. Again he heard of the mountains far inland,
where the Indians found copper and lead and a kind of stone that was
transparent.[9] He remained six weeks with the Sioux