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Updated: June 18, 2025
"The king makes war against the coureurs du bois. There is a price on the heads of Perrot and Du Lhut. We are all in the same boat." "You speak in riddles, sir." "I speak of riddles. Perrot and Du Lhut are good friends of the king. They have helped your excellency with the Indians a hundred times. Their men have been a little roystering, but that's no sin.
"Is it possible that they are going to abandon the attack?" cried De Catinat joyously. "Amos, I believe that you have saved us." But the wily Du Lhut shook his head. "A wolf would as soon leave a half-gnawed bone as an Iroquois such a prize as this." "But they have lost heavily." "Ay, but not so heavily as ourselves in proportion to our numbers.
What the mouth of the Mississippi was to La Salle the country of the Sioux became to Du Lhut a goal to be reached at all hazards. Not only did he reach it, but the story of how he rescued Father Hennepin from the Sioux is among the liveliest tales to be found in the literature of the wilderness.
One by one, therefore, the men on guard had crept away and had assembled at the back to cheer the seaman's shot and to groan as the remaining canoe sped like a bloodhound down the river in the wake of the fugitives. But the savages had one at their head who was as full of wiles and resource as Du Lhut himself.
Under such leaders as Du Lhut, the coureurs de bois built forts of palisades at various points throughout the West and Northwest. They had a post of this sort at Detroit some time before its permanent settlement, as well as others on Lake Superior and in the valley of the Mississippi. They occupied them as long as it suited their purposes, and then abandoned them to the next comer.
Had Duchesneau succeeded in his efforts, Du Lhut would have been severely punished, and probably excluded from the West for the remainder of his life. Thanks to Frontenac's support, he became the mainstay of French interests from Lake Ontario to the Mississippi.
But while La Salle was the most conspicuous among the pathfinders of this era, he was not the only one. Tonty, Du Lhut, La Forêt, La Mothe-Cadillac, and others were all in Frontenac's favor, and all had his vigorous support in their work.
He was about to make some answer when a dreadful cry broke suddenly out of the woods, a horrible screech, as from some one who was goaded to the very last pitch of human misery. Again and again, as they stood with blanched cheeks in the darkness, they heard that awful cry swelling up from the night and ringing drearily through the forest. "They are torturing the women," said Du Lhut.
"That is his death-whoop," said Du Lhut composedly. "It was a pity to fire, and yet it was better than letting him go." As he spoke the two others came back, Ephraim ramming a fresh charge into his musket. "Who was laughing?" asked Amos.
They met during the buffalo hunt, and it was about this time that some "spirits," or white men, were heard of, coming from Lake Superior. These proved to be the great ranger Greysolon du Lhut and four other Frenchmen. This man, cousin to Tonty, passed nearly his whole life in the woods, going from Indian town to Indian town, or planting outposts of his own in the wilderness.
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