94 Wisconsin Academy of /Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



a subtlety of sense more akin to the instinct of brutes than to hu- 

 man reason. He could approach like a fox, attack like a lion, 

 vanish like a bird." 



The Homeric and earliest ideal of an adventurer, single-handed, 

 into unknown regions, was Ulysses. It is true he goes grumbling 

 all through the Odyssey, — but for all that he is happier to the 

 very core than he could be with Circe or Calypso in any castle of 

 Indolence. He thrives under evil, and at every new stage of his 

 wanderings has new greatness thrust upon him. More than this : 

 According to Dante, who met him in the Inferno, he soon tired 

 of the Ithacan home he had sought so earnestly, and quitted it 

 for enterprises more distant and perilous than ever. 



Many of the early French pushed westward in pilgrimages 

 longer and more varied than that of the most wide-wandering 

 Greek. Their motto was : 



"No pent-up citadel contracts our powers, 

 But the whole boundless continent is ours." 



They pushed into the heart of the continent faster and farther, 

 thanks to matchless highways, — I mean rivers and lakes, — styled 

 by their wisest contemporarj^, Pascal, " roads which march and 

 carry us whithersoever we wish to go." Thanks also to bark ca- 

 noes, they flew as on the wings of eagles into the recesses of the 

 west. When wishing to traverse Indian routes the}' had sense 

 enough to avail themselves of Indian boats, doing in Eome as Ro- 

 mans do. For nine dollars worth of goods the voyageurs bought 

 a bark twenty feet by two that would last six years. It would 

 carry four men and more than their weight in baggage, yet was 

 not too heavy for one man to carry across the portage between 

 river and river, or round rapids which no boat could climb. Hen- 

 nepin's bark weighed only fifty pounds. At night or in rains it 

 was a better shelter than a tent. Thus the boatman was as inde- 

 pendent as a soldier would be who could carry on his shoulders 

 not onlv his horse and ba2:2:ao;e, but also his barracks. Previous 

 to the year 1673, no boat of tvood had ever ascended above Mon- 

 treal. The bark canoe of Judge Baird, of which I have spoken, 

 was on a larger scale — about thirty feet long and five broad. It 

 carried thirteen people and all their needments with ease. 



