796-7; V., 687, 911.]

[Footnote 137: Margry, VI., 553, 563, 575-580; Neill in _Mag. Western
History_, November, 1887.]

[Footnote 138: Perrot, 148; Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 42;
Hebberd, Wisconsin under French Dominion, chapters on the Fox wars.]

[Footnote 139: Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 190-1.]

[Footnote 140: Oneida county.]

[Footnote 141: Sawyer county.]

[Footnote 142: Margry, VI.]

[Footnote 143: Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 84, and citations; _vide
post_, p. 41.]

FRENCH SETTLEMENT IN WISCONSIN.

Settlement was not the object of the French in the Northwest. The
authorities saw as clearly as do we that the field was too vast for the
resources of the colony, and they desired to hold the region as a source
of peltries, and contract their settlements. The only towns worthy of
the name in the Northwest were Detroit and the settlements in Indiana
and Illinois, all of which depended largely on the fur trade.[144] But
in spite of the government the traffic also produced the beginnings of
settlement in Wisconsin. About the middle of the century, Augustin de
Langlade had made Green Bay his trading post. After Pontiac's war,[145]
Charles de Langlade[146] made the place his permanent residence, and a
little settlement grew up. At Prairie du Chien French traders annually
met the Indians, and at this time there may have been a stockaded
trading post there, but it was not a permanent settlement until the
close of the Revolutionary war. Chequamegon bay was deserted[147] at the
outbreak of the French war. There may have been a regular trading post
at Milwaukee in this period, but the first trader recorded is not until
1762.[148] Doubtless wintering posts existed at other points in
Wisconsin.

The characteristic feature of French occupancy of the Northwest was the
trading post, and in illustration of it, and of the centralized
administration of the French, the following account of De Repentigny's
fort at Sault Ste. Marie (Michigan) is given in the words of Governor La
Jonquiere to the minister for the colonies in 1751:[149]

"He arrived too late last year at the Sault Ste. Marie to fortify
himself well; however, he secured himself in a sort of fort large enough
to receive the traders of Missilimakinac.... He employed his hired men
during the whole winter in cutting 1100 pickets of fifteen feet for his
fort, with the doublings, and the timber necessary for the construction
of three houses, one of th