Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/455

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ENGLISH TRADE AT CHAGOUAMIGON BAY.
445

particular notice of him, formerly at Niagara; since which he has behaved well, and now came to be informed of my sentiments on the uneasy state of the Indians to the westward. He told me his people would quietly wait his return, before they took any resolutions; confirming all the accounts I have received of the practices of the Spaniards and French."

ALEXANDER HENRY AT CHAGOUAMIGON BAY, A.D. 1765.

After the English reoccupation, Henry formed a partnership for trade and furs with his friend Cadot, and he determined in 1765 to establish a post at Chagouamigon Bay. He found the Ojibways there dressed in deer skins, because in consequence of the French and English war they had not received goods of European manufacture. He built his house within the bay, which by the 15th of December was frozen. On the 20th of April, 1766, the ice broke up, and several canoes arrived with the news that the Ojibways had gone to war. On the 15th of May, a part of the warriors had arrived in forty canoes, who said that four days' travel from that point, four hundred strong, they had met six hundred Sioux, and battled all day, when the latter fell back across the river, and camped for the night, and the next day retreated. At this time Waubojeeg was the chief at Chagouamigon, and the battle may have been that which tradition asserts took place in the valley of the Saint Croix River. Henry writes that the Ojibways lost thirty-five men. Some one told the United States Commissioner McKenney that Shingaba Wossin, of Sault Ste. Marie, was in the great St. Croix fight. At the time McKenney visited the country in 1826, this chief was supposed to be sixty-three years old. If the battle of the spring of 1766, alluded to by Henry, was the great St. Croix conflict, the chief would have been at the time but three years of age.