118 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Leti&s. 



south of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, they were no match 

 on those waters for Batch and English rivals in fur trading. The 

 latter could afford to pay four times as mucli for furs as the French 

 could. Nine pence was the export duty on a beaver at New 

 York ; in Quebec it was six times as much. In New York fur- 

 trade was free. At Quebec seven hundred crowns were charged 

 for permission to send a single boat up the Ottawa. Good reason 

 then had the French to seek furs so far northwest that they could 

 escape European competitors. 



The result was that they had reached L-ike Huron in 1615, and 

 soon hurried on to Michigan, while they had no port on the 

 nearer lake, Ontario, till two generations afterward in 1673, when 

 they threw up Fort Frontenac at ils outlet, where Kingston now 

 stands. Its builder, Frontenac, intended it merely as a base of 

 operations for fur trade so far west that he would be independent 

 of the governor of Montreal. Seven years afterward in 1679, 

 La Salle, having launched the first sloop ever built on Lake Erie, 

 voyaged in her through St. Clair, Huron and Michigan to the 

 mouth of Green Bay. 



His vessel was there freighted with rich furs, but as she was 

 lost on her first passsage eastward. La Salle's experiment did not 

 recommend the lower lakes. On the contrary it tended to make 

 the upper, or Ottawa route, more popular than ever. 



The doors into Wisconsin were two, — La Pointe and Green 

 Bay, and these two were about equal favorites. The first mis- 

 sionary arrived at La Pointe in 1660. Fur traders came icith him. 

 Nine years after, in 1669, when Father Allouez reached Green 

 Bay to found a mission, fur traders were on the ground, and bad 

 become so domineering in that end of the world, that the mis- 

 sionary was brought by the Indians from Lake Superior as a 

 protector. 



Nicholas Perrot, who in 1683 built a fort near the mouth of the 

 Chippewa river, though on the west bank of the Mississippi, had 

 entered Green Bay eighteen or twenty years earlier. He wrote 

 a volume, ^ — -not for publication — but for the information of the 

 Canadian government. In this work which was first printed less 

 than twenty years ago, in 1864, he describes a score of journeys in 



