r dangers, they must die of that. Marquette
told them his own life was nothing compared to the good word he wanted
to carry to those southern tribes, and he laughed at the demon and
instructed them in his own religion.

The aboriginal tribes, by common instinct, tried from the first to keep
the white man out of countries which he was determined to overrun and
possess, regardless of danger.

At the end of a voyage of thirty leagues, or about ninety miles, the
explorers reached the head of the Bay of Puans, and a region thickly
settled with Winnebagoes and Pottawotomies between the bay and Winnebago
Lake, Sacs on Fox River, and Mascoutins, Kickapoos, and Miamis. Fox
River, which they followed from the head of the bay, and of which the
lake seemed only an expansion, was a rocky stream. A later traveler has
told us that Fox River in its further extent is very crooked, and while
seeming wide, with a boundary of hills on each hand, it affords but a
slender channel in a marsh full of rushes and wild oats.

The Kickapoos and Mascoutins were rude, coarse-featured Indians. Though
the missionary exhorted them as seriously as he did their gentler
neighbors, he could not help remarking to Jolliet that "the Miamis were
better made, and the two long earlocks which they wore gave them a good
appearance."

It was the seventh day of June when the explorers arrived in this
country of cabins woven of rushes; and they did not linger here.
Frenchmen had never gone farther. They were to enter new lands untrodden
by the white race. They were in what is now called the state of
Wisconsin, where "the soil was good," they noted, "producing much corn;
and the Indians gathered also quantities of plums and grapes." In these
warmer lands the season progressed rapidly.

Marquette and Jolliet called the chiefs together and told them that
Jolliet was sent by the governor to find new countries, and Marquette
had been commissioned of Heaven to preach. Making the chiefs a present,
without which they would not have received the talk seriously, the
explorers asked for guides to that tributary which was said to run into
the great river.

The chiefs responded with the gift of a rush mat for Marquette and
Jolliet to rest on during their journey, and sent two young Miamis with
them. If these kindly Indians disliked to set the expedition further on
its way, they said nothing but very polite things about the hardihood
of Frenchmen, who could venture with onl