100 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



self to unpathed waters, undreamed shores and sands and miser- 

 ies enough by Stanley, in quest of Livingston, or the sources of 

 the Nile and Congo. 



Seekers of pleasure in the pathless woods followed Nicollet 

 into Wisconsin^ as well as elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley. 

 Their race endured, and it still endures. Some survivals of it 

 were met with in the first decade of our century far up the Mis- 

 souri, by Lewis and Clark, and by Pike at the sources of the 

 Mississippi. Within the last ten years, the British Major Butler, 

 with whom I traveled down the Bed Eiver of the North in 1872, 

 encountered them on his pilgrimages throughout the great lone 

 land and the wild north land to the shores of the Pacific. 



Enamoured of wild sports, the French more than two centuries 

 ago rushed from Lower Canada into the borders of the Upper 

 Lakes. They came the sooner thanks to unrivaled facilities for 

 boating, hunting and fishing, — to an appetite for open air which 

 grows by what it feeds on, — to their feeling at home in wigwams, 

 to their passion to br'eak loose from law martial and monkish, and 

 to enjoy unbounded license, as well as to the pre eminence which 

 knowledge gave them among barbarians. To the love of fun, 

 then, and the full feast of it fresh as the woods and waters that 

 inspired it, — with which he could fill himself in western wilds, 

 we in Wisconsin owe the explorations of Nicollet and others of 

 like temper, and so our most ancient historic land marks. One 

 of the first French foundations here was laid in fun. Fun then 

 was /M72damental. 



But if fun led the way to exploring the far West, faith also 

 was there, and not least in Wisconsin, a French foundation. 



Faith followed hard after fun, and sometimes outstripped it. 

 The friar, Le Caron, was on Lake Huron before Nicollet had pene- 

 trated half way there. Nicollet lingered in the Isle of Allumette, 

 several hundred miles short of Lake Huron, till 1620. But, 

 five years earlier, mass had been already said on that lake by the 

 Franciscan with sandaled feet and girt with his knotted cord. 

 The monk's passage had been paid by the governor, but he worked 

 his own passage and that bare-footed, since shoes would injure the 

 bark canoe. He thus wrote to his superior: " It would be hard 



