into the headwaters of the Illinois,
and General Harrison says that in the spring, the boats with their
loading "passed freely from one to the other." In Michigan the heads of
the streams that flowed into Lake Huron interlocked with the heads of
those that went down to Lake Michigan. In Wisconsin, the voyageurs
passed from Green bay up the Fox river to Lake Winnebago, thence by the
Fox again to the portage between the Fox and Wisconsin, thence down the
Wisconsin river to the Mississippi. Through this important channel of
trade passed nine-tenths of the goods that supplied the Indians above
the Illinois river and those in upper Louisiana.

This great network of lakes, rivers and portages was in turn connected
by the waterways of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, with the great head
and center of all the fur trade of the western world, the city of
Montreal.

The only practicable means of communication was by the canoe. Most of
the territory of the northwest, being, as General Harrison observes,
"remarkably flat, the roads were necessarily bad in winter, and in the
summer the immense prairies to the west and north of this, produced
such a multitude of flies as to render it impossible to make use of pack
horses." Bogs, marshes and sloughs in endless number added to the
difficulties of travel. Hence it was, that the power that commanded the
lakes and water courses of the northwest, commanded at the same time all
the fur trade and the Indian tribes in the interior. France forever lost
this control to Great Britain at the peace of 1763, closing the French
and Indian war, and at the close of the revolution it passed to us by
the definitive treaty of 1783.

The importance of the posts of Detroit and Michillimacinac, forming the
chief connecting links between the northwest and the city of Montreal,
now fully appears. First in importance was Detroit. It commanded all the
valuable beaver country of northern Ohio and Indiana, southern Michigan,
and of the rivers entering Lakes Erie and Huron. The trade coming from
the Cuyahoga, the Sandusky, the tributaries of the Miami and Scioto, the
Wabash and the Maumee, all centered here. The French traders, and after
them the British, did a vast and flourishing business with the savages,
trading them brandy, guns, ammunition, blankets, vermilion and worthless
trinkets for furs of the highest value. The significance of the old
trading posts at Miamitown (Fort Wayne), Petit Piconne (Tippecanoe)