ade carried on by Perrot with the
Sioux, their enemy at that time, threatened to pillage the post at Green
Bay.[120] The closing of the Ottawa to the northern fur trade by the
Iroquois for three years, a blow which nearly ruined Canada in the days
of Frontenac, as Parkman has described,[121] not only kept vast stores
of furs from coming down from Michillimackinac; it must, also, have kept
goods from reaching the northwestern Indians. In 1692 the Mascoutins,
who attributed the death of some of their men to Perrot, plundered his
goods, and the Foxes soon entered into negotiation with the
Iroquois.[122] Frontenac expressed great apprehension lest with their
allies on the Fox and Wisconsin route they should remove eastward and
come into connection with the Iroquois and the English, a grave danger
to New France.[123] Nor was this apprehension without reason.[124] Even
such docile allies as the Ottawas and Pottawattomies threatened to leave
the French if goods were not sent to them wherewith to oppose their
enemies. "They have powder and iron," complained an Ottawa deputy; "how
can we sustain ourselves? Have compassion, then, on us, and consider
that it is no easy matter to kill men with clubs."[125] By the end of
the seventeenth century the disaffected Indians closed the Fox and
Wisconsin route against French trade.[126] In 1699 an order was issued
recalling the French from the Northwest, it being the design to
concentrate French power at the nearer posts.[127] Detroit was founded
in 1701 as a place to which to attract the northwestern trade and
intercept the English. In 1702 the priest at St. Joseph reported that
the English were sending presents to the Miamis about that post and
desiring to form an establishment in their country.[128] At the same
date we find D'Iberville, of Louisiana, proposing a scheme for drawing
the Miamis, Mascoutins and Kickapoos from the Wisconsin streams to the
Illinois, by changing their trading posts from Green Bay to the latter
region, and drawing the Illinois by trading posts to the lower
Ohio.[129] It was shortly after this that the Miamis and Kickapoos
passed south under either the French or English influence,[130] and the
hostility of the Foxes became more pronounced. A part of the scheme of
La Motte Cadillac at Detroit was to colonize Indians about that
post,[131] and in 1712 Foxes, Sauks, Mascoutins, Kickapoos,
Pottawattomies, Hurons, Ottawas, Illinois, Menomonees and others were
gathered t