charged with
having a secret interest in this very lucrative trade, and, for that
reason, winking at violations of the King's orders regulating it. Even
Jesuit missionaries sometimes were thought by their opponents to be
more eager to share this money-making traffic than to win souls.

But a more numerous class than these stationary traders were the
so-called _coureurs de bois_, or wood-rangers. These were wild fellows
whom the love of adventure lured into the wilderness not less strongly
than the love of gain. They roamed the forests, paddled the streams
and lakes, hunted and trapped, trafficked with the Indians wherever and
whenever they pleased, often in violation of express orders, and
smuggled their forbidden furs into the trading-posts. Sometimes they
spent whole seasons, even years, among the savages, taking to wife red
women. Lawless fellows as these were, they helped mightily to extend
French influence and subdue the continent {190} to the white man's
rule. Daring explorers, they penetrated remote regions, hobnobbed with
the natives, and brought back accounts of what they had seen.

One of their leaders, Daniel Greysolon du Lhut, whose name is borne by
the city of Duluth, in Minnesota, was a conspicuous figure in the wild
frontier life. He carried on a vast fur-trade, held his rough
followers well in hand, led a small army of them in fighting the
battles of his country, and even appeared at the French court at
Versailles.

The half-breed children of these _coureurs_, growing up in Indian
wigwams, but full of pride in their French blood, became a strong link
binding together the two races in friendly alliance and deciding the
Indians, in time of war, to paint themselves and put on their feathers
for the French rather than for the English. Therefore any account of
pioneer Frenchmen should include a sketch of the _coureurs de bois_.

To illustrate this type, one is here taken as an example who was born
in France, and who was a gentleman by birth and education, but whose
insatiable love of adventure led him to take up the _coureur's_ life,
with all its vicissitudes. Withal, he {191} was a man of note in his
day, played no inconsiderable part in opening up the wilderness, and
suggested the formation of that vast monopoly, the Hudson Bay Fur
Company. His journals, after lying for more than two hundred years in
manuscript, have been published and have proved very interesting. They
give such an inside pi