130 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts^ and Letters. 



its tipper waters. For those tribes who lingered in Wisconsin 

 there was no hope of fighting the Iroquois fire-arms without fire- 

 arms, and no hope of fire-arms except from the French. The 

 governors of New France, to whom the Iroquois were sworn ene- 

 mies, — at once saw the policy of lifting up these fugitives, unit- • 

 lag them in amity to each other, and to the tribes where they had 

 fled for refuge, supplying them with kettles, tobacco, but above 

 all with guns and powder, — ;in a word by every means stealing 

 their hearts. For this end they dispatched into Wisconsin and 

 further a spscie^ of envoys of whiih Nicolas Perrot was a good 

 representative. 



This Indian commissioner had been preparea for his functions 

 by much, western experience. He was first in Jesuit employ as a 

 lay-brothe'', and then became an adventurer in quest of fun and 

 fur where no white man's foot had trod. No doubt he was in 

 riiake half Indian, and when present at a war danc3 would lead 

 it, like Frontenac at three score and ten, whooping like the rest, 

 or rather outwhooping them all. The Indians named him " Pop- 

 corn," perhaps because when heated he seemed to them to grow 

 ten times bigger, like the dwarf who declared that though his 

 avoirdupois in the scale was ordinarily only one hundred and 

 twenty pounds, whenever he got mad he weighed a ton. 

 - His official career in Wisconsin began at latest in 1665. After 

 making friendship with the Pottawatomies at Grreen Bay, he 

 pushed up Fox River and into a lake of which it is an outlet. 

 There he held a council with the Outagamies. After this fashion 

 he went on for five years, — at home with tribe after tribe — at 

 home in the customs aod dialects of all the enormous angle be- 

 tween the upper Mississippi and the upper lakes. He brought 

 many nations into a confederation with each other and against the 

 Iroquois. His fame, like Salomon's, brought visitors into Green 

 Bay from the uttermost parts of the earth,— some who spoke of 

 trading with Mexican Spaniards and others who described white 

 men far north in a house which walked on the water — meaniog 

 the English on Hudson bay. (2 178 La Potherie.) How he was 

 borne aloft on a buffalo robe, reverenced for fashioning iron as 

 squaws did dough in a kneading trough, and feared as holding in 

 his hands thunder and lightning, we have seen 'Iready. 



