STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE. SOME NOTABLE VISITORS TO EARLY WISCONSIN ==================================================================== USGENWEB ARCHIVES NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor. This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by: Tina S. Vickery ==================================================================== STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE by Reuben Gold Thwaites New York Cincinnati Chicago American Book Company Copyright, 1900, by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Sto. Badger Sta. W. P. 7 page(s) 59-69 SOME NOTABLE VISITORS TO EARLY WISCONSIN It has been pointed out that wandering fur traders were in Wisconsin at a very early date. We have seen that Niolet, Radisson, and Groseilliers made Wisconsin known to the world, at a time when Massachusetts colony was still young. It will be remembered that when Father Menard went to Lake Superior, in 1660, to convert the Indians, there were several French fur traders with him. As early as the spring of 1662, these same traders had gone across country to the mouth of the Fox River. Three years later the Menominees and Pottawattomies, then living on both sides of the bay, were visited by Nicolas Perrot, a daring young spirit from Quebec, who had come to the then Far West to make his fortune in trading with the red men. Perrot was one of the most picturesque characters in Wisconsin history. In Canada he had been a of the Jesuit missionaries, acquiring in this work an education which was slight as to books, but broad as to knowledge of the Indians and of forest life. He was now twenty-one years of age, and started out for himself as soon as he was his own master. For five years Perrot wandered up and down the eastern half of Wisconsin, frequently visiting his friends, the Mascoutins and Miamis, on the Fox River. He smoked Pipes of peace with them and with other forest and prairie tribes, and joined in their feasts of beaver, dog, and other savage delicacies. In 1670 he and four other Frenchmen, packing their furs into bundles of convenient size, joined a large party of Indians going down to Montreal in canoes, to trade. Perrot did not return with his companions, but visited Quebec, and there received an appointment from the government to rally the Western tribes in a great council at Sault Ste. Marie. Here a treaty was to be made, binding the savages to an alliance with France. The French were very jealous of the English, who had, through the guidance of Radisson and Groseilliers, commenced fur trade operations in the Hudson Bay country. It was feared that they would entice the Indians of the upper Great Lakes to trade with them, for the English offered higher prices for furs than did the French. Perrot spent the winter in visiting the tribes in Wisconsin and along the northern shores of Lakes Michigan and Huron, and succeeded in inducing large bands of them to go to the Sault early in May (1671). The council was attended by an enormous gathering, representing tribes from all over the Northwest, even from the north shores of Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. Father Marquette was there with the Ottawas, and several other famous missionaries came to the council. The interpreter, who knew Indian dialects by the score, was no less a person than Louis Joliet. The French government was represented by Saint Lusson, who concluded the desired treaty, with great ceremony took ,formal possession of all this country for the king of France, and reared on the spot a great cedar pole, to which he fastened a lead plate bearing, the arms of his country. This symbol the simple and wondering savages could not understand: and as soon as the Frenchmen had gone home again, they tore it down, fearing that it was a charm which might bring bad luck to the tribesmen. And now we find Perrot suddenly losing his office, and forced for ten years to live a quiet life in the French settlements on the lower St. Lawrence. He married a well-to-do young woman, reared a considerable family, and became a man of some influence. But he was always eager to be back in the forest, wandering from tribe to tribe, and engaging in the wilderness trade, where the profits were great, though the risks to life and property were many. In 1681 he returned to the woods, but not till three years later was he so far west as Mackinac. In 1685 he appeared once more at Green Bay, this time holding the position of Commandant of the West, with a little company of twenty soldiers. He now had almost unlimited authority to explore and traffic as he would, for the only salary an official of that sort used to get, in New France, was the right to trade with the Indians. He had already lost money in working for the government as an Indian agent, and his present operations were wholly directed toward getting it back again. He went up the Fox and down the Wisconsin, and then ascended the Mississippi to trade with the wild Sioux tribe. For headquarters, he erected a little log stockade on the east bank of the Mississippi, about a mile above the present village of Trempealeau, and south of the mouth of Black River. In the year 1888, the site of this old stockade was discovered by a party of historical students, and many of the curious relics found there can now be seen in the museum of the State Historical Society, at Madison. All through the winter of 1685-86, Perrot traded here with the Sioux. He had a most captivating manner of treating Indians; for a long time, few of them ventured to deny any request made by him. Chiefs from far and near would come to the Trempealeau " fort," as it was called, and hold long councils and feasts with the great white chief, and more than once he was subjected to the curious Sioux ceremony of being wept over. A chief would stand over his guest and weep copiously, his tears falling upon the guest's head; when the chief's tear ducts were exhausted, he would be relieved by some headman of the tribe, who in turn was succeeded by another, and so on until the guest was well drenched. This must have been a very trying experience to Perrot, but he was shrewd enough to pretend to be much pleased by it. In the spring of 1686, the same year in which he gave the silver ostensorinm to the Jesuit chapel at De Pere, the commandant proceeded up the Mississippi to the broadening which was, about this time, named Lake Pepin by the French. On the Wisconsin shore, not far above the present village of Pepin, he erected another and stronger stockade, Fort St. Antoine. It was here, three years later, that, after the manner of Saint Lusson at Sault Ste. Marie, he formally took possession, in the name of his king, of all the Upper Mississippi valley. Several other forts were built by Perrot along the Mississippi, none of them more than groups of stout log houses. These were surrounded by a stockade wall of heavy logs well planted in the ground, sharpened at the top, pierced for musket fire, and sometimes surmounted by a small cannon. The stockade whose ruins were unearthed at Trempealeau, measured about forty-five by sixty feet. One of his stockades, Fort Perrot, was on the Minnesota shore of Lake Pepin; still another, Fort St. Nicholas, was near the " lower town" of the Prairie du Chien of to-day, at the confluence of the Wisconsin and the Mississippi; and it also appears that he had a stockade lower down the Mississippi, to guard a lead mine which he had discovered near Galena, because lead was an important article for both fur traders and Indians. Sometimes traders fought among themselves, for the possession of a lead mine. Perrot made frequent voyages to the settlements on St. Lawrence River, and engaged in some of the French expeditions against the hostile Iroquois of New York. While, on the whole, he was successful in holding the Western tribes in friendship to New France, his position was not without grave perils. One time his old friends, the Mascoutins, rose against him, claiming that had killed one of their warriors. The claim may have been true, for he was a man of violent temper, and ruled the Wisconsin forests after the despotic fashion of an Asiatic prince. The Mascoutins captured Perrot, in company with a Pottawattomie chief, and carrying them to their village, robbed the commandant of all his furs, and decided to burn the prisoners at 'the stake. But while being conducted to the fire, the two managed by artifice to escape, and at last reached in safety their, friends at the mouth of the Fox River. Another time, the Miamis captured Perrot, and would have burned him except for the interference of the Fox Indians, with whom he was friendly. In 1699, owing to the uprising of the Foxes, the king ordered that all the Western posts be abandoned, and their little garrisons removed to Montreal and Quebec. Thus suddenly ended the career of Perrot, who returned a poor man, for his recent losses in furs had been heavy, and his expenses of keeping up the posts large. Again and again be sought redress from the government, and the Wisconsin Foxes earnestly pleaded that he be sent back to them, as 11 the best beloved of all the French who have ever been among us." But his star bad set, he no longer had influence; and it h ad just been decided to punish his friends the Foxes. Perrot lived about twenty years longer, on the banks of the Lower St. Lawrence, and died in old age, like Joliet, in neglect and poverty. During much of the time that Perrot was commandant of the West, several other great fur traders were conducting operations in Wisconsin. The greatest of these was the Chevalier La Salle, the famous explorer, who plays a large part on the stage of Western history. It particularly in the history of the Mississippi valley has been claimed for La Salle that he was in Wisconsin in 1671, two years before Joliet, and actually canoed on the Mississippi River, but this is more than doubtful. We do know that in 1673 one of his agents was trading with the Sioux to the west of Lake Superior; and that In 1679 he came to Green Bay in a small vessel called the Griffin, the first sailing craft on the Great Lakes above the cataract of Niagara. La Salle was a coureur de bois, most of this time, for he operated in a field far larger than that for which he had a license. Leaving his ship, which was afterward wrecked, he and fourteen his men proceeded in canoes southward along the western coast of Lake Michigan, visiting the sites of Milwaukee and other Wisconsin lakeshore cities. Finally, after many strange adventures, they ascended St. Joseph River, crossed over to the Kankakee River, and spent the winter in a log fort which they built on Peoria Lake, a broadening of the Illinois River. At least one priest was thought necessary in every well-equipped exploring expedition. La Salle had quarreled with the Jesuits, and hated them ; hence the ministers of religion in his party were three Franciscan friars, one of them being Father Louis Hennepin, who afterward became famous. When La Salle determined to spend the winter at Peoria Lake, he sent Hennepin forward with two coureurs de bois, to explore the upper waters of the Mississippi. These three adventurers descended the Illinois River in their canoe, and then ascended the Mississippi to the Falls of St. Anthony, where now lies the great city of Minneapolis; there t hey met some Sioux, and went with them upon a buffalo hunt. But the Indians, although at first friendly, soon turned out to be a bad lot, for they robbed their guests, and practically held them as prisoners. This was in the early summer of 168o. Luckily for Hennepin and his companions, the powerful coureur de bois, Daniel Graysolon Duluth (du Luth) appeared on the scene. Duluth was, next to Perrot, the leading man in the country around Lake Superior and the Upper Mississippi valley. He had been spending the winter trading with the Sioux in the lake country of northern Minnesota, and along Pigeon River, which is now the dividing line between Minnesota and Canada. With a party of ten of. his boatmen, he set out in June to reach Mississippi, his route taking him up the turbulent little Bois Brule River, over the mile and a half of portage trail to Upper Lake St. Croix, and down Croix River to the Mississippi. On reaching the 1atter, he learned of the fact that Europeans were being detained and maltreated by the Sioux, and at once went rescued them. The summer was spent among the Indians in company with Hennepin's party, who, now -'that Duluth was found to be their friend, were handsomely treated. In the autumn, Duluth, Hennepin, and their companions all returned down the Mississippi, up the Wisconsin, and down the Fox, and spent the winter at Mackinac. After that, Duluth was frequently upon the Fox-Wisconsin route, and traded for buffalo hides and other furs with the Wisconsin tribes. Another famous visitor to Wisconsin, in those early days, was Pierre le Sueur, who in 1683 traveled from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, over the Fox-Wisconsin route, and traded with the Sioux at the Falls of St. Anthony and beyond. His fur trade grew, in a few years, to large proportions; for he was a shrewd man, and was related to some of the officials of New France. This enabled him to secure trading licenses for the Western country, and other valuable privileges, which gave him an advantage over the unlicensed traders, like Duluth, who had no official friends. In 1693, Le Sueur was trading in Duluth's old country; and, in order to protect the old Bois Brule and St. Croix route from marauding Indians, he built a log fort at either end on Chequamegon Bay, and the other on an island in the Mississippi, below the mouth of the St. Croix, A few years later, Le Sueur was in France, where he obtained a license to operate certain "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth," which he claimed to have discovered along the banks of the Upper Mississippi, In the summer of 1700, he and his party opened lead mines in the neighborhood of the present Dubuque and Galena, and also near the modern town of Potosi, Wisconsin. He does not appear to have been very successful as a miner; but his fur trade was still enormous, and his many explorations led to the Upper Mississippi being quite correctly represented on the maps of America, made by the European geographers. A missionary priest, Father St. Cosme, of Quebec, was in Green Bay in October, 1699, and proposed to visit the Mississippi region, by way of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers. But the warlike Foxes, who were giving the French a great deal of trouble at this time, had forbidden any white man passing over this favorite waterway, so St. Cosme was obliged to go the way that La Salle had followed, up the west shore of Lake Michigan and through Illinois. The party stopped at many places along the Wisconsin lake shore, but the only ones which we can identify are the sites of Sheboygan and Milwaukee, where there were large Indian villages. It is not to be supposed that these were all the Frenchmen to tarry in or pass through Wisconsin during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Doubtless there were scores, if not hundreds of others, fur traders, voyageurs, soldiers, and priests; we have selected but a few of those whose movements were recorded in the writings of their time. Wisconsin was a key point in the geography of the West; here were the interlaced sources of rivers flowing north into Lake 'Superior, east and northeast into Lake Michigan, and west and southwest into the Mississippi River. The canoe traveler from Lower Canada could, with short portages, pass through Wisconsin into waters reaching far into the interior of the continent, even to the Rocky Mountains, the lakes of the Canadian Northwest, and the Gulf of Mexico. This is why the geography of Wisconsin became known so early in the history of our country, why Wisconsin Indians played so important a part on the stage of border warfare, and why history was being made here at a time when some of the States to east of us were still almost unknown to white men.