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No doubt, he thought he was coming to a country where, at last, he would find that short route to the Chinese seas which had been the dream of many Frenchmen since the days of Cartier. We have no answer to give to the question that naturally suggests itself, whether Champlain ever saw Nicolet on his return, and heard from him the interesting story of his adventures.
Prominent seigneuries in this region were Pointe du Lac or Tonnancour, the estate of the Godefroys de Tonnancour; Cap de la Magdelaine and Batiscan, the patrimony of the Jesuits; the fief of Champlain, owned by Desjordy de Cabanac; Ste Anne de la Perade, Nicolet, and Becancour.
This was the power that France used to support her in the struggle with England for the Northwest. The trader used his influence to promote peace between the Northwestern Indians. The date rests on inference; see Bibliography of Nicolet in Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., and cf. Rels., 1660; Wis. Hist. Colls., X., XI; Narrative and Critical Hist. Radisson, 173-5, and Jes. Hist. Jes. Hist.
Of Frenchmen thus trained to woodcraft during Champlain's lifetime the most notable were Etienne Brule, Nicolas Vignau, Nicolas Marsolet, and Jean Nicolet. Unfortunately the three first did not leave an unclouded record. Brule, after becoming a most accomplished guide, turned traitor and aided the English in 1629.
This coureur de bois Nicolet presents a grotesque appearance as he mounts the rims of the two valleys where the two bowls touch each other, bowls so full that in freshet the water sometimes overflows the brim and makes one continuous valley.
Nicolet had passed into the hands of the Courvals, a trading family of Three Rivers, and Becancour was held by Pierre Robineau, the son of his famous father, Rene Robineau de Becancour. On all of these seigneuries some progress had been made, but often it amounted to very little. Better results had been obtained both eastward and westward of the region.
Yet, though they, as Cartier, Champlain, Nicolet, La Salle, and scores of others did not find the way to the western sea, their unappreciated, heroic efforts made at their own expense stretched the line of French forts all the way across the valley from sea to mountain range, completing, as one historian has represented it, a T, but as it seems to me rather a cross, with a perpendicular column reaching from the gulf to Hudson's Bay, and its transverse strip from the Big Horn Mountains to Cape Breton.
Lawrence Valley that another son of France, Jean Nicolet, again the first of Europeans so far as is now certainly known, looked over into the great valley of the Mississippi from the north. Champlain, dying beneath the Rock of Quebec, had touched two of the Great Lakes twenty years before.
From the shelter of that big oak would step Nicolet, the brave, first among Wisconsin explorers, and last to receive the credit for his hardihood. Jean Nicolet! She loved the sound of it. And with him was La Salle, straight, and slim, and elegant, and surely wearing ruffles and plumes and sword even in a canoe.
Doubtless, like Nicolet, they told their stories to the priests when they went back to the altars for sacrament, so that even their experiences have been for the most part preserved. But when we know under what distracting and discouraging conditions even the priest wrote, we wonder, as Thwaites says, that anything whatever has been preserved in writing.
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