In August, 1654, while those Indians were trading at Quebec, thirty young Frenchmen equipped themselves to return with them, and engage in the fur trade, but after they commenced their journey were driven back by the Iroquois.
GROSEILLIERS AND RADISSON THE EARLIEST EXPLORERS OF MINNESOTA.
The great impulse to trade with the natives of Lake Superior was given by the explorations of two natives of France, Medard Chouart, afterwards called Sieur des Groseilliers, and his brother-in-law, Pierre d'Esprit, the Sieur Radisson.[1]
They were the first to push to the head of Lake Superior, and after visiting the Tionnontantes Hurons, who had fled from their enemies to the vicinity of the headwaters of the Black and Chippeway Rivers in Wisconsin, they wintered with the Dahkotahs or Sioux, west of Lake Superior, in the Mille Lacs region of Minnesota.
During the spring and early summer they became familiar with the shores of Lake Superior, and upon Franquelin's Map of 1688, what is now Pigeon River, and a portion of the boundary between the United States and Dominion of Canada, is called Groseilliers.[2] On the 19th of August, 1660, Groseilliers, by way of the Ottawa River, reached
- ↑ Medard Chouart was born near Ferte Sous Jouarre, eleven miles east of Meaux in France, and in 1641, when only sixteen years old, came to Canada. In 1647 he married Helen, widow of Claude Etienne, the daughter of a pilot, Abraham Martin, whose baptismal name is still attached to the "Plains of Abraham" in the suburbs of Quebec. His first wife in 1651 died, and in 1653 he married another widow, whose maiden name was Margaret Hayet Radisson, and a sister of his fellow explorer.
Pierre d'Esprit, the Sieur Radisson, was born at St. Malo, and in 1656 at Three Rivers, Canada, married Elizabeth, the daughter of Madeleine Hainault, and after her death, the daughter of Sir John Kirk or Kertk, a zealous Huguenot, became his wife. - ↑ See Neill's History of Minnesota, 5th edition. 1883.
