110 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts^ and Letters. 



In Paraguay they had built up a model state. The natives be- 

 came tolerant of their culture and compliant to their bidding in 

 every particular. They rose and sought their beds, were married 

 and given in marriage, weaned their children, removed from place 

 to place, raised stock or grain, fixed prices, and used their gains 

 at the dictation of spiritual guides. They were docile, but unde- 

 veloped, or developed only in some single prescribed direction. 

 They were literally sheep, submissive when fleeced and even 

 flayed and slaughtered at the pleasure of their shepherds. But 

 their development was arrested. At their best they never became 

 men, but remained children of larger growth, or rather became 

 weaker in mind as they grew stronger in muscle. The purpose 

 was to build up a second Paraguay in Korth America. An ex- 

 periment, tried in Lower Canada, had failed. Its want of success 

 was attributed to the roving habits of the tribes and the impossi- 

 bility of persuading them to renounce nomadic life. It was tried 

 again, with more sanguine hopes, on Lake Huron, for the tribes 

 there were fixed through the year in one abode. When the Hurons 

 had been overpowered by foes and driven into Wisconsin, the 

 experiment was repeated there. 



The westward exodus of Hurons into Wisconsin began as early 

 as 1650. Onward from that time the French became known there, 

 and that most favorably, as a race superhuman in arms, in arts 

 and in benevolence. Such must have been the report concerning 

 them which fell from the lips of fugitive converts. It roused the 

 braves on the farthest shores of the farthest lakes to set sail in 

 quest of the admirable strangers. 



Missionaries were the more encouraged to venture far west ; 

 thanks to invitations from the aborigines. As early as 1611, the 

 first fleet of Hurons that descended the St. Lawrence to meet 

 Champlain said to him, " Come to our country, teach us the true 

 faith." In 1633 it is chronicled that Hurons vied with each other 

 for the honor of carrying missionaries home with them in their 

 boats of bark. The volume of Jesuit Relations for 1640, states 

 that fathers, invited by Algonquins on Lake Superior, were on 

 the point of pushing forward even to that most western sea. 



In 1679 an Outagarai chief, espying friars among La Salle's com- 



