thousand miles
west, far away upon the shores of Lake Superior. On the 21st of April,
1668, he left Quebec for Montreal. The distance was one hundred and
eighty miles up the river. The voyage was made in a birch canoe, with
three boatmen to aid him in paddling it against the stream. They could
proceed about thirty miles a day. The voyage occupied about a week.
There were Indian villages on the banks where they occasionally slept.
At other times they encamped in the forest, the night wind lulling them
to sleep, as it sighed through the leafless branches, which the
returning sun of spring had scarcely yet caused to bud.

At Montreal there was a little cluster of cabins and wigwams,
presenting a very different aspect from the stately city which now
adorns that site. After a short tarry there, waiting for a suitable
guide, to traverse more than a thousand miles of almost pathless
wilderness, a party of Nez-Perce Indians, from Lake Superior, came down
the river in their canoes. With them Marquette embarked. It was a
wonderful voyage which this gentleman, from the refinement and culture
of France, made alone with these savages.

They paddled up the Ottawa River a distance of nearly four hundred
miles. Thence through a series of narrow streams and minor lakes, they
entered Lake Nipissing. Descending the rapid flood of French River,
through cheerless solitudes eighty miles in extent, they entered
Georgian Bay. Crossing this vast sheet of water over an expanse of
fifty miles, they saw the apparently boundless waves of Lake Huron
opening before them. The northern shores of this inland sea they
skirted, until they reached the river St. Mary, which connects Lake
Superior with Lake Huron. Here two missionary stations were
established.

One was near the entrance of the river into Lake Huron, about forty
miles below the celebrated Falls of St. Mary. The other was at Green
Bay, an immense lake in itself, jutting out from the northwestern
extremity of Lake Michigan. Father Marquette reared his log-cabin in
the vicinity of a small Indian village, on the main land, just south of
the island of Mackinaw. He named the station St. Ignatius. In this vast
solitude this heroic man commenced his labors of love. There were about
two thousand souls in the tribes immediately around him. With great
docility they listened to his teachings, and were eager to be baptized
as Christians. But the judicious father was in no haste thus to secure
merely