ve tribes which lived on the flesh of the bison. In Minnesota they
met a second time the Kri or Kinistino Indians of north-central
Canada, and joined one of their camps in the spring of 1662, somewhere
to the west of Lake Superior. With Kri guides they started away to the
north and north-east, no doubt by way of the Lake of the Woods, the
English River, Lake St. Joseph, and the Albany River, thus reaching
the salt sea at James Bay, the southernmost extension of Hudson Bay.
Or they may have proceeded by an even shorter route, though with
longer portages for canoes, through Lake Nipigon to the Albany.

The summer of 1662 they passed on the islands and shores of James Bay
hunting "buffalo"[6] with the Indians. Then, in 1663, travelling back
along the same route they had followed in the previous year, they
regained Lake Superior, and so passed by the north of Lake Huron to
the Ottawa River and the St. Lawrence. But on their return to Three
Rivers they were arrested by the French Governor, D'Avaugour, who
condemned them to imprisonment and severe fines. The courts of France
gave them no redress, and in their furious anger Chouart and Radisson
went over to the English, offered their services to England, and so
brought about the creation of the Hudson Bay Company.

[Footnote 6: More probably musk oxen.]

Radisson's journey from England to Hudson Bay has been treated of in
an earlier chapter: it is preferable to follow out to its finish the
great, western impulse of the French, which led them to neglect for a
time the doings of the British on the east coast of North America and
in the sub-Arctic regions of Hudson Bay.

From 1660 onwards the Jesuit missionaries again took up vigorously
that work of Christianizing the Amerindians which had been so
completely checked by the frightful ravages of the Iroquois between
1648 and 1654.

By 1669 the Jesuits had three permanent stations in western Canada.
The first was the mission station at Sault Ste. Marie, the second was
the station of Ste. Esprit, on Lake Superior (not far from the modern
town of Ashland), and the third was the station of St. Francois Xavier
at the mouth of the Fox River, on Green Bay, Lake Michigan.

As regards some of the sufferings which these missionaries had to go
through when travelling across Canada in the winter, I quote the
following from _The Relations of the Jesuits_ (p. 35):--

"I [Father de Crepieul] set out on the 16th of January, 1674, from the