may increase the probability that the views now presented have some rational foundation, or at least some claim to candid consideration.1

'Dr. Bushnell [Nature and Supernatural], indeed, going by a similar route, arrives at the same conclusion; but without defining, he assumes the exist ence of a personal Being, God, which for the purpose of my argument is not necessary. I have had occasion to examine his work, however, only since this paper was submitted to the Academy.

FIRST FRENCH FOOT-PRINTS BEYOND THE LAKES; OR, WHAT BROUGHT THE FRENCH SO EARLY INTO THE NORTHWEST?

BY JAMES D. BUTLER, LL. D.

Copper mines in the north, and burial-barrows everywhere, bespeak prehistoric races in Wisconsin. But in modern Wisconsin there was little agricultural settlement before 1836, which we may accordingly reckon its American birth year.

Between these two developments, however, there was a third, a sort of midway station between the mound-builder or the Indian and the Anglo-Saxon - namely, the French period. This portion of our annals seems worthy of more attention than it has yet received.

The French were early on Lake Huron, and even in Wisconsin. They were there before the cavaliers in Virginia, the Dutch at Albany, and the Puritans of Boston had pushed inland much more than a day's journey. The Mississippi was mapped before the Ohio. Champlain sailed on Lake Huron in 1615, only seven years after the settlement of Quebec. A monk had arrived there a month or two before Champlain.

On early maps the contrast between French knowledge and English ignorance is at once plain to the eye. On the map drawn by Champlain, in 1632, we see the Lakes which we call Ontario, Huron, Superior and Michigan, while no one of them, nor indeed any river St. Lawrence, is discoverable on Peter Heylin's atlas, the one best known in London twenty years afterward. On the blank, where those inland seas should have figured, we read the words America Mexicana, as if Mexico had extended to Hudson's Bay.

But while the English on the Atlantic coast were ignorant of western geography, and before the French in Canada numbered ten thousand, Joliet and Marquette, in 1673, traversed Wisconsin from lake to river. They were long supposed to be among the earliest explorers of Wisconsin. In 1853, however, the Catholic

historian, J. G. Shea, pointed out in a volume of Jesuit Relations the following words, written from Quebec to France, in 1640, by Father Le Jeune: "M. Nicollet, who has penetrated into the most distant regions, has assured me that if he had pushed on three days longer down a great river which issues from the second lake of the Hurons (evidently meaning Lake Michigan), he would have found the sea."

The word Mississippi, meaning "great water," was ambiguous, and, though really denoting a river, might well be mistaken for a sea, especially by an adventurer who knew the sea to be in that direction, and who believed it by no means remote.

On the strength of this Jesuit testimony, Parkman remarks: "As early as 1639, Nicollet ascended the Green Bay of Lake Michigan and crossed to the waters of the Mississippi." This was within nine years after the founding of Boston, which claims to be of all northern cities the most ancient.

But in the lowest deep a lower deep still opens. According to the latest researches of Benjamin Sulte, Nicollet was in Wisconsin four or five years earlier than 1639. He started west from Canada in 1634, and returned the year following. The best Canadian investigators assure us that he never traveled west again, but, marrying and becoming interpreter at Three Rivers, below Montreal, he remained there or thereabouts thenceforward till his death. All agree that Nicollet visited Wisconsin. If it is proved that he was not here in 1639 or afterward, he must have been here before. There is some reason for holding that Nicollet had penetrated into Wisconsin at a date still earlier than 1634.

Chicago is not known to have been visited by any European before 1673. In the autumn of that year Marquette, returning from his voyage down the Mississippi, was conducted from the Illinois river by Indians to that spot as affording the shortest portage to Lake Michigan. The next year that missionary, on a coasting tour along the lake, after a voyage of forty-one days from Green Bay, reached Chicago,- which was then uninhabited. As sickness disabled him from going further, his Indian oarsman built him a hut, and two French traders who already had a post a few leagues inland, ministered to him till the next spring, when

he so far recovered as to proceed to St. Joseph. Another Jesuit was also met at Chicago by four score warriors of the Illinois tribe in 1676.

Three years afterward, in 1679, La Salle found no inhabitants there. On his map made the next year he describe it as a portage of only a thousand paces, yet thought it in no way suited for communication between the lake and Illinois river, as the latter at low water was for forty leagues not navigable. Within two years after that, however, in 1681, he preferred this route for his own passage. On the sixteenth of December starting from Chicago with canoes on sleds, he arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi in one hundred and seven days, that is on the sixth of the following April.

The Chicago portage was traversed by Tonty, La Salle's most trusted and trust-worthy lieutenant, June, 1683, and by Durantye in 1685. La Salle's brother detained there in 1688 by a storm, made maple sugar, and in one hundred and ten days after leaving its harbor, had made his way to Montreal.

After eleven years more, St. Cosme found a house of the Jesuits there established, at which, as at a sort of post office, Father Gravier obtained in 1700, letters from Paris. From that point La Salle had written a letter to La Barre, Governor of Canada, in 1683, and in the map by Franquelin, royal hydrographer at Quebec, dated 1684, eighty houses,- meaning wigwams, are set down on the site of Chicago. It was then viewed. as a northern out post of La Salle's central castle the Rock of St. Louis, that marvellous natural fortress which the French explorer found ready to his hand,-"his wish exactly to his heart's desire," now called Starved Rock, near the confluence of the Big Vermilion with the Illinois river, a few miles west of Ottawa.

All the way down from this era of La Salle the French as rovers, traders, settlers, soldiers and missionaries in our Northwest, are traceable generation after generation. The chain is as unbroken as that of apostolical succession has ever been fancied.

How shall we account for the phenomenon I have now sketched, that the French penetrated so far inland so early and so persistently? My answer to this question is implied in the words Fun, Faith, Fur, False Fancies, Finesse and Feudalism.

Niccllet, it is admitted, was west of Lake Michigan before La Salle was born. What brought him thus early into the heart of

the continent?

My answer is that he came for sport; yes, just for the fun of the thing—or the romance and exhilaration of adventure.

Where is the community in which it is not proverbial to this day that worlds of fun lie in camping? What amount of civilization can kill off love for a feast of tabernacles, or relish for camp-meetings? What boy reads Robinson Crusoe without a passion to run away? Hunting, fishing, boating, discovering new lakes and streams, new varieties of woodland and opening, attacking or eluding antagonists - whether men or beasts-fire, frost, flood, famine: "foemen worthy of their steel," for what man that is young, strong and brave, must not these excitements have charins? When will the English give up their Alpine club? In France no man was more of a sportsman than the King, Louis XIV, and in his era especially, French country gentlemen spent most of their time hunting and fishing. Accordingly for the French those pursuits had dignified associations. The first French party that ever wintered on the shore of Lake Erie thus wrote home, more than two centuries ago: "We were in a terrestrial paradise. Fish and beaver abounded. We saw more than a hundred roebucks in a single band, and half as many fawns. Bear's meat was more savory than any pork in France. We dried or buccaned the meat of the nine largest. The grapes were as large and sweet as any at home. We even made wine. No lack of prunes, chestnuts and lotus fruit all the autumn. None of us were homesick for Montreal." Far west was the happy hunting ground of Indian fable. There too the French found it in fact.

The late Judge Baird of Green Bay used to describe as the happiest three weeks of his life, the time when, taking his family and friends, with a crew of Indian oarsmen, he voyaged in a bark canoe from our great lake to our great river, along the track of Joliet and Marquette. Every day the ladies gathered flowers as fair as Proserpine plucked in the field of Enna, while the men were never without success as fishers and hunters. They camped, usually early in the afternoon, wherever inclination was attracted by natural beauty or romantic appearance. After feasting on