122 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



niflcantly called "dry-nurses." Such dry-nurses for English and 

 American fur kings were discovered in French underlings. 



Fun and faith both gave a new impulse to the fur trade. With 

 it they formed a three fold cord which drew the French from end 

 to end of the Mississippi, as well as to the farthest fountains of the 

 St. Lawrence, and even further. La Salle deserves deathless fame, 

 and will have it, because he was first to follow the Mississippi 

 down to the gulf. But his grand object was to secure an outlet 

 for fur that was not half the year frozen up, and the other half 

 infested by EngHsh rivals, Iroquois ambushes, and worse than all, 

 Canadian farmers of the royal revenue. Duluth, whose name we 

 have seen revived and bestowed on a mushroom metropolis, " the 

 zenith city of the unsaited sea," two centuries ago had penetrated 

 beyond the farthest corner of our innermost and uppermost lake. 

 His mission was to intrigue and foil the English on Hudson Bay. 

 Ere long a French fort rose on the Saskatchawan, two thousand 

 miles, as men traveled, from the seaboard. This station came up 

 under the auspices of the French Company of the Northwest, in- 

 corporated in 1676, in antagonism to the Hudson Bay Company, 

 which came into existence six: years earlier. It long bore sov- 

 ereign sway over a wide savage domain. 



The natives preferred the manufactures of the English, but the 

 manners of the French, L'ke all savages, they were swayed by 

 impulse more than by interest. They would give more for one 

 plug of tobacco brought to their wigwams than they could buy 

 twenty for jn Albany or Hudson Bay. Hence they traded with 

 the French, and became their tools. One result was that in 1684, 

 and again three years after, Nicolas Perrot, the supreme fur 

 trader and Indian negotiator of his time, persuaded five hundred 

 Indians from Wisconsin and near it to paddle their canoes all the 

 way to Niagara in order to fight for the French. 



In 172J:, Bourgmout was already exploring the Upper Missouri. 

 But on this line of Western research Yerendrje outstripped all 

 others. Pushin:y on step by step for ten years, he discovered the 

 Eocky Mountains in 1743 on New Year's day, sixty-one years 

 before our L^wis and Clarke. The point of his discovery was 

 just above where the Yellowstone joins the Missouri. That re- 



