ot
appear in the Archives.

[351] _Beauharnois au Ministre, 15 Mai, 1729_; _Ibid., 21 Juillet,
1729_.

[352] _Beauharnois et Hocquart au Ministre, 2 Novembre, 1730._ An Indian
tradition says that about this time there was a great battle between the
Outagamies and the French, aided by their Indian allies, at the place
called Little Butte des Morts, on the Fox River. According to the story,
the Outagamies were nearly destroyed. Perhaps this is a perverted
version of the Villiers affair. (See _Wisconsin Historical Collections_,
viii, 207.) Beauharnois also reports, under date of 6 May, 1730, that a
party of Outagamies, returning from a buffalo hunt, were surprised by
two hundred Ottawas, Ojibwas, Menominies, and Winnebagoes, who killed
eighty warriors and three hundred women and children.

[353] Some particulars of this affair are given by Ferland, _Cours
d'Histoire du Canada_, ii. 437; but he does not give his authority. I
have found no report of it by those engaged.

[354] _Relation de la Defaite des Renards par les Sauvages Hurons et
Iroquois, le 28 Fevrier, 1732._ (Archives de la Marine.)

[355] The story is told in Snelling, _Tales of the Northwest_ (1830),
under the title of _La Butte des Morts_, and afterwards, with
variations, by the aged Augustus Grignon, in his _Recollections_,
printed in the _Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society_, iii.;
also by Judge M. L. Martin and others. Grignon, like all the rest, was
not born till after the time of the alleged event. The nearest approach
to substantial evidence touching it is in a letter of Beauharnois, who
writes in 1730 that the Sieur Dubuisson was to attack the Outagamies
with fifty Frenchmen and five hundred and fifty Indians, and that Marin,
commander at Green Bay, was to join him. _Beauharnois au Ministre, 25
Juin, 1730._

[356] _Memoire sur le Canada, 1736._

[357] Charles Bodmer was the artist who accompanied Prince Maximilian of
Wied in his travels in the interior of North America.

The name Outagamie is Algonquin for a fox. Hence the French called the
tribe Renards, and the Americans, Foxes. They called themselves
Musquawkies, which is said to mean "red earth," and to be derived from
the color of the soil near one of their villages.

CHAPTER XV.

1697-1741.

FRANCE IN THE FAR WEST.

French Explorers.--Le Sueur on the St. Peter.--Canadians on the
Missouri.--Juchereau de Saint-Denis.--Benard de la Harpe on Red
River.--Adventures of