olet, one of Champlain's wood runners, had gone westward
as far as Green Bay and coasted the shores of Lake Michigan. Jesuits,
where they preached on Lake Superior, had been told of a vast land
beyond the Sweet Water Seas,--Great Lakes,--a land where wandered
tribes of warriors powerful as the Iroquois.

Yearly, when the Algonquins came down the Ottawa to trade, Jesuits and
young French adventurers accompanied the canoes back up the Ottawa,
hoping to reach the Unknown Land, which rumor said was bounded only by
the Western Sea. However, the priests went no farther than Lake
Nipissing; but two nameless French wood runners came back from Green
Bay in August of 1656 with marvelous tales of wandering hunters to the
north called "Christines" (Crees), who passed the winter hunting
buffalo on a land bare of trees (the prairie) and the summer fishing on
the shores of the North Sea (Hudson's Bay). They told also of fierce
tribes south of the Christines (the Sioux), who traded with the Indians
of the Spanish settlements in Mexico.

{104} All New France became fired by these reports. When Radisson
returned from Onondaga in April of 1659, he found his brother-in-law,
Chouart Groseillers, just back from Nipissing, where he had been
serving the Jesuits, with more tales of this marvelous undiscovered
land. The two kinsmen decided to go back with the Algonquins that very
year; for, confessed Radisson in his journal, "I longed to see myself
again in a boat."

Thirty other Frenchmen and two Jesuits had assembled in Montreal to
join the Algonquins. More than sixty canoes set out from Montreal in
June, the one hundred and forty Algonquins well supplied with firearms
to defend themselves from marauding Iroquois. Numbers begot courage,
courage carelessness; and before the fleet had reached the Chaudiere
Falls, at the modern city of Ottawa, the canoes had spread far apart in
utter forgetfulness of danger. Not twenty were within calling distance
when an Indian prophet, or wandering medicine man, ran down to the
shore, throwing his blanket and hatchet aside as signal of peace, and
shouting out warning of Iroquois warriors ambushed farther up the river.

Drunk with the new sense of power from the possession of French
firearms, perhaps drunk too with French brandy obtained at Montreal,
the Algonquins paused to take the strange captive on board, and
returned thanks for the friendly warning by calling their benefactor a
"coward and a dog