116 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



Thej were further attracted by the presents and invitations of 

 Ghamplain, who, in 1615, within seven years after the first tree 

 was felled at Quebec, had held councils on Like Huron, and 

 bidden the natives to bring down their furs. Western Indians were 

 still more stimulated to traffic by adventurers, who, as we have 

 seen, had in 1609 begun to be domesticated among the aborigines 

 and to share their hunts. Wrapped in furs, striding on snow 

 shoes with bodies half bent, through the gray forests and frozen 

 pine swamps, among black trunks and dark ravines, these young 

 Frenchmen, though they meant not so, were commercial travelers, 

 and they fulfilled their mission as shrewdly as those who now 

 sally from Chicago. Those Chicago emissaries are dextrous deal- 

 ers, yet very possibly might learn some new tricks of trade could 

 thev recover the lost arts of their forerunners whose palace cars 

 were bark canoes, and their commercial hotels wigwams. Drum- 

 mers from the lake-metropolis now encounter men of their own 

 stamp from St. Louis. So did the early French agents conflict 

 even in Illinois and Michigan with those who had been dispatched 

 from the Hudson. In order to get beyond New York competitors, 

 the French hurried still further loest than they otherwise would 

 have ventured. 



Again, these roving and fraternizing Freochmen did not long 

 go among the aborigines empty-handed, or even selling by sam- 

 ples. They took with them into the heart of the land those 

 goods — light and cheap — for which the Indian demand was the 

 greatest. 



At sight of an iron hatchet, says Perrot, Wisconsin tribes 

 raised their eyes blessing heaven for sending them a race able to 

 furnish so powerful a deliverer from all their woes. Every bar 

 of iron was in their eyes a divinity. But hra.ndy was from first 

 to last the one thing needful in a trader's outfit. It was indeed 

 contraband according to the dignitaries of both church and state. 

 Yet then as now it had free course on some underground railroad. 

 It was more easily carried because, before exposed for sale, it was 

 vjatered as profusely as the stock of our railroads. Each gallon 

 of proof liquor swelled to six. The lowest ijvice for brandy was 

 a chopine for a beaver skin. How much a French chopine 



