y two canoes, and seven in their
party, on unknown worlds.

The young Miamis, in a boat of their own, led out the procession the
tenth morning of June. Taking up paddles, the voyageurs looked back
at an assembled multitude--perhaps the last kindly natives on their
perilous way--and at the knoll in the midst of prairies where hospitable
rush houses stood and would stand until the inmates took them down and
rolled them up to carry to hunting grounds, and at groves dotting those
pleasant prairies where guests were abundantly fed.

Three leagues up the marshy and oats-choked Fox River, constantly
widening to little lakes and receding to a throat of a channel, brought
the explorers to the portage, or carrying place. The canoes then had
to be unloaded, and both cargo and boats carried overland to a bend of
the Miscousing, which was the Indian name for Wisconsin River. "This
portage," says a traveler who afterwards followed that way, "is half a
league in length, and half of that is a kind of marsh full of mud." In
wet seasons the head of Fox River at that time seemed not unlikely to
find the Wisconsin, for Marquette has set it down in his recital that
the portage was only twenty-seven hundred paces.

When the two Miamis had helped to carry the goods and had set the French
on the tributary of the great river, they turned back to their own
country. Before the men entered the boats Marquette knelt down with
them on the bank and prayed for the success of the undertaking. It was
a lovely broad river on which they now embarked, with shining sands
showing through the clear water, making shallows like tumbling discs
of brilliant metal,--a river in which the canoes might sometimes run
aground, but one that deceived the eye pleasantly, with islands all vine
covered, so when a boat clove a way between two it was a guess how far
the Wisconsin spread away on each side to shores of a fertile land.
Oaks, walnuts, whitewood, and thorn trees crowded the banks or fell
apart, showing prairies rolling to wooded hills. Deer were surprised,
stretching their delicate necks down to drink at the margin. They looked
up with shy large eyes at such strange objects moving on their stream,
and shot off through the brush like red-brown arrows tipped with white.
The moose planted its forefeet and stared stolidly, its broad horns set
in defense.

"Sieur Jolliet," said the missionary, once when the canoes drew
together, "we have now left the waters which f