From Lake Nipissing they passed to Lake Huron, where the fleet divided.  Radisson and Groseillers went with the Indians, who crossed Lake Huron for Green Bay on Lake Michigan.  The birch canoes could not venture across the lake in storms; so the boats rounded southward, keeping along the shore of Georgian Bay.  Cedar forests clustered down the sandy reaches of the lake.  Rivers dark as cathedral aisles rolled their brown tides through the woods to the blue waters of Lake Huron.  At one point Groseillers recognized the site of the ruined Jesuit missions.  The Indians waited the chance of a fair day, and paddled over to the straits at the entrance to Lake Michigan.  At Manitoulin Island were Huron refugees, among whom were, doubtless, the waiting families of the Indians with Radisson.  All struck south for Green Bay.  So far Radisson and Groseillers had travelled over beaten ground.  Now they were at the gateway of the Great Beyond, where no white man had yet gone.

The first thing done on taking up winter quarters on Green Bay was to appease the friends of those warriors slain by the Mohawks.  A distribution of gifts had barely dried up the tears of mourning when news came of Iroquois on the war-path.  Radisson did not wait for fear to unman the Algonquin warriors.  Before making winter camp, he offered to lead a band of volunteers against the marauders.  For two days he followed vague tracks through the autumn-tinted forests.  Here were markings of the dead leaves turned freshly up; there a moccasin print on the sand; and now the ashes of a hidden camp-fire lying in almost imperceptible powder on fallen logs told where the Mohawks had bivouacked.  On the third day Radisson caught the ambushed band unprepared, and fell upon the Iroquois so furiously that not one escaped.

After that the Indians of the Upper Country could not do too much for the white men.  Radisson and Groseillers were conducted from camp to camp in triumph.  Feasts were held.  Ambassadors went ahead with gifts from the Frenchmen; and companies of women marched to meet the explorers, chanting songs of welcome.  “But our mind was not to stay here,” relates Radisson, “but to know the remotest people; and, because we had been willing to die in their defence, these Indians consented to conduct us.”

Before the opening of spring, 1659, Radisson and Groseillers had been guided across what is now Wisconsin to “a mighty river, great, rushing, profound, and comparable to the St. Lawrence.” [7] On the shores of the river they found a vast nation—­“the people of the fire,” prairie tribes, a branch of the Sioux, who received them well.[8] This river was undoubtedly the Upper Mississippi, now for the first time seen by white men.  Radisson and Groseillers had discovered the Great Northwest.[9] They were standing on the threshold of the Great Beyond.  They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed, not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories.  They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,—­illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon.  They saw a land waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire waiting for the nation builders.