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Both Father Brebeuf, in his Relation in 1636, and Father Lalemant, in his Relation in 1639, give long accounts of the game, the causes for its being played, the excesses in gambling to which it leads, and the methods which prevail in its practice. La Potherie and LaHontan barely mention it. I approached them and found that the game they were playing at was what they called the game of platter.
Lake Lahontan never had an outlet. The first chemical deposits to be made along its shores were deposits of travertine, in places eighty feet thick. Its floor is spread with fine clays, which must have been laid in deep, still water, and which are charged with the salts absorbed by them as the briny water of the lake dried away.
By-and-by the precise dates are necessarily indefinite some change in the rainfall, unregistered by any contemporary 'New York Herald, made the waters of these big lakes shrink and evaporate. Lake Lahontan shrank away like Alice in Wonderland, till there was absolutely nothing left of it; Lake Bonneville shrank till it attained the diminished size of the existing Great Salt Lake.
Prior to the outbreak of the war no widely known English writer had tried to describe it; and the absorbing French books of Lahontan, Hennepin, and Charlevoix had reached but a small circle. The prolonged conflict in America naturally stimulated interest in the new country.
Those who may wish to study Indian Social Life in its primitive conditions will do well to read the work of Baron de Lahontan, recently edited by Dr. R. G. Thwaites. He was among the earliest writers on aboriginal affairs, and his "New Voyages to North America" gives the results of travel and observation about the years 1683-1701.
The same may be said of the Meschaouay, up which our people have been, but not so far as the Baron Lahontan, who passed on it above three hundred miles almost due west, and declares it comes from the same ridge of hills above mentioned, and that divers rivers from the other side soon make a large river, which enters into a vast lake, on which inhabit two or three great nations, much more populous and civilized than other Indians; and out of that lake a great river disembogues into the South Sea."
Upon the Black Rock Desert, in northern Nevada, there are large springs once covered by Lake Lahontan, in which fish are found. It is thought that the ancestors of these fish must have been left there at the time of the drying up of the water. After the Glacial period the present arid climate began to prevail in the land.
LAKES BONNEVILLE AND LAHONTAN. These names are given to extinct lakes which once occupied large areas in the Great Basin, the former in Utah, the latter in northwestern Nevada. Their records remain in old horizontal beach lines which they drew along their mountainous shores at the different levels at which they stood, and in the deposits of their beds.
In almost every valley of the Sierras and the Rockies the records of these vanished ice streams may be found in cirques, glacial troughs, roches moutonnecs, and morainic deposits. It was during the Glacial epoch that Lakes Bonneville and Lahontan were established in the Great Basin, whose climate must then have been much more moist than now.
Henry, in his account of the game at Michilimackinac says "they are at a considerable distance from each other, as a mile or more." Charlevoix places the goals in a game with eighty players at "half a league apart" meaning probably half a mile. LaHontan estimates the distance between the goals at "five or six hundred paces." III, p. 319, Kane's Wanderings, p. 189, LaHontan, Vol.
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