impressions for after travelers and historians, by transcribing them in
his journal. It was not only the romantic side, but the usefulness of
the position that appealed to him, commanding the trade from Canada to
the Lakes, "and a door by which we can go in and out to trade with all
our allies." The magnificent scenery charmed the intrepid explorer. The
living crystal waters of the lakes, the shores green with almost
tropical profusion, the natural orchards bending their branches with
fruit, albeit in a wild state, the bloom, the riotous, clinging vines
trailing about, the great forests dense and dark with kingly trees where
birds broke the silence with songs and chatter, and game of all kinds
found a home; the rivers, sparkling with fish and thronged with swans
and wild fowl, and blooms of a thousand kinds, made marvelous pictures.
The Indian had roamed undisturbed, and built his temporary wigwam in
some opening, and on moving away left the place again to solitude.

Beside its beauty was the prospect of its becoming a mart of commerce.
But these old discoverers had much enthusiasm, if great ignorance of
individual liberty for anyone except the chief rulers. There was a
vigorous system of repression by both the King of France and the Church
which hampered real advance. The brave men who fought Indians, who
struggled against adverse fortunes, who explored the Mississippi valley
and planted the nucleus of towns, died one after another. More than half
a century later the English, holding the substantial theory of
colonization, that a wider liberty was the true soil in which
advancement progressed, after the conquest of Canada, opened the lake
country to newcomers and abolished the restrictions the Jesuits and the
king had laid upon religion.

The old fort at Detroit, all the lake country being ceded, the French
relinquishing the magnificent territory that had cost them so much in
precious lives already, took on new life. True, the French protested,
and many of them went to the West and made new settlements. The most
primitive methods were still in vogue. Canoes and row boats were the
methods of transportation for the fur trade; there had been no printing
press in all New France; the people had followed the Indian expedients
in most matters of household supplies. For years there were abortive
plots and struggles to recover the country, affiliation with the Indians
by both parties, the Pontiac war and numerous smaller skir