only by night and hid by day. No camp fires were kindled.
No muskets were fired even for game; and the paddlers were presently
reduced to food of _tripe de roche_--green moss scraped from rocks.
Birch canoes could not cross Lake Huron in storm; so the Indians kept
close to the south shore of Georgian Bay, winding among the pink
granite islands, past the ruined Jesuit missions across to the Straits
of Mackinac and on down Lake Michigan to Green Bay.

{106} "But our mind was not to stay here," relates Radisson, "but to
know the remotest people." Sometime between April and July of 1659 the
two white men had followed the Indian hunters across what is now the
state of Wisconsin to "a mighty river like the St. Lawrence." They had
found the Mississippi, first of white men to view the waters since the
treasure-seeking Spaniards of the south crossed the river. They had
penetrated the Unknown. They had discovered the Great Northwest--a
world boundlessly vast; so vast no man forever after in the history of
the human race need be dispossessed of his share of the earth.
Something of the importance of the discovery seems to have impressed
Radisson; for he speaks of the folly of the European nations fighting
for sterile, rocky provinces when here is land enough for all--land
enough to banish poverty.

The two Frenchmen's wanderings with the tribes of the prairie--whether
those tribes were Omahas or Iowas or Mandanes or Mascoutins or
Sioux--cannot be told here. It would fill volumes. I have told the
story fully elsewhere. By spring of 1660 Radisson and Groseillers are
back at Sault Ste. Marie, having gathered wealth of beaver peltries
beyond the dreams of avarice; but scouts have come to the Sault with
ominous news--news of one thousand Iroquois braves on the warpath to
destroy every settlement in New France. Hourly, daily, weekly, have
Quebec and Three Rivers and Montreal been awaiting the blow.

The Algonquins refuse to go down to Quebec with Radisson and
Groseillers. "Fools," shouts Radisson in full assembly of their chiefs
squatting round a council fire, "are you going to allow the Iroquois to
destroy you as they destroyed the Hurons? How are you going to fight
the Iroquois unless you come down to Quebec for guns? Do you want to
see your wives and children slaves? For my part, I prefer to die like
a man rather than live a slave."

The chiefs were shamed out of their cowardice. Five hundred young
warriors undertoo