First French Foot-Prints Beyond the Lakes. 85' 



FIEST FRENCH FOOT-PEINTS BEYOND THE LAKES r 

 OR, WHAT BROUGHT THE FRENCH SO EARLY 

 INTO THE NORTHWEST? 



Bt JAMES D. BUTLEK, LL. D. 



Copper mines in the north, and burial-barrows everywhere, be- 

 speak prehistoric races in Wisconsin. Bat in modern Wisconsi» 

 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 Wiscon- 

 sin. 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: 



