Pathfinders of the West | Page 6

Traders towed down the Saskatchewan in the Summer of 1900
Tepees dotted the Valley
An Eskimo Belle
Samuel Hearne
Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle
Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun
Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago
Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's drawing, 1733-1747
Fort Prince of Wales
Beaver Coin of the Hudson's Bay Company
Alexander Mackenzie
Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for the Value of Three Beaver Skins
Quill and Beadwork on Buckskin
Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior
Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River
Slave Lake Indians
Good Hope, Mackenzie River, Hudson's Bay Company Fort
The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight Sun
Captain Meriwether Lewis
Captain William Clark
Tracking up Stream
Typical Mountain Trapper
The Discovery of the Great Falls
Fighting a Grizzly
Packer carrying Goods across Portage
Spying on Enemy's Fort
Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies
On Guard
Indians of the Up-country or Pays d'en Haut


PART I
PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON
ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO EXPLORE THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST, AND THE NORTH

[Illustration: Map of the Great Fur Company.]

Pathfinders of the West
CHAPTER I
1651-1653
RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk Valley--In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape
Early one morning in the spring of 1652 three young men left the little stockaded fort of Three Rivers, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence, for a day's hunting in the marshes of Lake St. Peter. On one side were the forested hills, purple with the mists of rising vapor and still streaked with white patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the sunlight. On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence, more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just as they do to-day. Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice poured their spring flood into the St. Lawrence.
The hunters were very young. Only hunters rash with the courage of untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year. Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois. The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France. It was from Three Rivers that Piescaret, the famous Algonquin chief who could outrun a deer, had set out against the Iroquois, turning his snowshoes back to front, so that the track seemed to lead north when he was really going south, and then, having thrown his pursuers off the trail, coming back on his own footsteps, slipping up stealthily on the Iroquois that were following the false scent, and tomahawking the laggards.[1] It was from Three Rivers that the Mohawks had captured the Algonquin girl who escaped by slipping off the thongs that bound her. Stepping over the prostrate forms of her sleeping guards, such a fury of revenge possessed her that she seized an axe and brained the nearest sleeper, then eluded her pursuers by first hiding in a hollow tree and afterward diving under the debris of a beaver dam.
[Illustration: Three Rivers in 1757.]
These things were known to every inhabitant of Three Rivers. Farmers had flocked into the little fort and could venture back to their fields only when armed with a musket.[2] Yet the three young hunters rashly left the shelter of the fort walls and took the very dangerous path that led between the forests and the water. One of the young men was barely in his seventeenth year.[3] This was Pierre Esprit Radisson, from St. Malo, the town of the famous Cartier. Young Radisson had only come to New France the year before, and therefore could not realize the dangers of Indian warfare. Like boys the world over, the three went along, boasting how they would fight if the Indians came. One skirted the forest, on the watch for Iroquois, the others kept to the water, on the lookout for game. About a mile from Three Rivers they encountered a herdsman who warned them to keep out from the foot of the hills. Things that looked like a multitude of heads had risen out of the earth back there, he said, pointing to the forests. That set the young hunters loading their pistols and priming muskets. It must also have chilled their zest; for,