bringing British and Americans into conflict over that
territory.

In these water-systems Wisconsin was the link that joined the Great
Lakes and the Mississippi; and along her northern shore the first
explorers passed to the Pigeon river, or, as it was called later, the
Grand Portage route, along the boundary line between Minnesota and
Canada into the heart of Canada.

It was possible to reach the Mississippi from the Great Lakes by the
following principal routes:[62]

1. By the Miami (Maumee) river from the west end of Lake Erie to the
Wabash, thence to the Ohio and the Mississippi.

2. By the St. Joseph's river to the Wabash, thence to the Ohio.

3. By the St. Joseph's river to the Kankakee, and thence to the Illinois
and the Mississippi.

4. By the Chicago river to the Illinois.

5. By Green bay, Fox river, and the Wisconsin river.

6. By the Bois Brule river to the St. Croix river.

Of these routes, the first two were not at first available, owing to the
hostility of the Iroquois.

Of all the colonies that fell to the English, as we have seen, New York
alone had a water-system that favored communication with the interior,
tapping the St. Lawrence and opening a way to Lake Ontario. Prevented by
the Iroquois friends of the Dutch and English from reaching the
Northwest by way of the lower lakes, the French ascended the Ottawa,
reached Lake Nipissing, and passed by way of Georgian Bay to the islands
of Lake Huron. As late as the nineteenth century this was the common
route of the fur trade, for it was more certain for the birch canoes
than the tempestuous route of the lakes. At the Huron islands two ways
opened before their canoes. The straits of Michillimackinac[63]
permitted them to enter Lake Michigan, and from this led the two routes
to the Mississippi: one by way of Green bay and the Fox and Wisconsin,
and the other by way of the lake to the Chicago river. But if the trader
chose to go from the Huron islands through Sault Ste. Marie into Lake
Superior, the necessities of his frail craft required him to hug the
shore, and the rumors of copper mines induced the first traders to take
the south shore, and here the lakes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota
afford connecting links between the streams that seek Lake Superior and
those that seek the Mississippi,[64] a fact which made northern
Wisconsin more important in this epoch than the southern portion of the
state.

We are now able to see how the river-c