important tribe of whom we treat in these pages, is divided into several distinctly marked divisions, occupying different sections of their extensive country, and we have been obliged to skip from one section to another, that we might relate events which have happened to each, in the order of time.
In this chapter we will again return to the Lac Coutereille and Lac du Flambeau divisions, whom we left, in a previous chapter, in possession of the sources of the Wisconsin and Chippeway rivers—two large tributaries of the Mississippi.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century these two bands already numbered one thousand souls. They had located their villages on the beautiful lakes which form the head waters of these rivers, and to some extent they practised the arts of agriculture, raising large quantities of corn and potatoes, the seed for which had been introduced amongst them by their traders on Lake Superior. They also collected each autumn large quantities of wild rice, which abounded in many of their lakes and streams. As game became scarce in the vicinity of their villages, they moved in large hunting camps towards the Mississippi, and on the richer hunting grounds of the Dakotas they reaped rich harvests of meat and furs.
The older and more intelligent men of these bands attribute to this day their steady westward advance, and final possession of the country nearly to the Mississippi, through following the example and footsteps of their first and old pioneer trader, Michel Cadotte, a younger brother of J.B. Cadotte, mentioned in previous chapters.
The memory of this man, the marks of whose wintering posts are pointed out to this day throughout every portion of the Ojibway country, is still dear to the hearts of the few old chiefs and hunters who lived cotemporary with him, and received the benefits of his unbounded charitable
