It was October when they came to Lake Superior.  The forests were painted in all the glory of autumn, and game abounded.  White fish appeared under the clear, still waters of the lake like shoals of floating metal; bears were seen hulking away from the watering places of sandy shores; and wild geese whistled overhead.  After the terrible dangers of the voyage, with scant sleep and scanter fare, the country seemed, as Radisson says, a terrestrial paradise.  The Indians gave solemn thanks to their gods of earth and forest, “and we,” writes Radisson, “to the God of gods.”  Indian summer lay on the land.  November found the explorers coasting the south shore of Lake Superior.  They passed the Island of Michilimackinac with its stone arches.  Radisson heard from the Indians of the copper mines.  He saw the pictured rocks that were to become famous for beauty.  “I gave it the name of St. Peter because that was my name and I was the first Christian to see it,” he writes of the stone arch.  “There were in these places very deep caves, caused by the violence of the waves.”  Jesuits had been on the part of Lake Superior near the Sault, and poor Menard perished in the forests of Lake Michigan; but Radisson and Groseillers were the first white men to cruise from south to west and west to north, where a chain of lakes and waterways leads from the Minnesota lake country to the prairies now known as Manitoba.  Before the end of November the explorers rounded the western end of Lake Superior and proceeded northwest.  Radisson records that they came to great winter encampments of the Crees; and the Crees did not venture east for fear of Sautaux and Iroquois.  He mentions a river of Sturgeons, where was a great store of fish.

The Crees wished to conduct the two white men to the wooded lake region, northwest towards the land of the Assiniboines, where Indian families took refuge on islands from those tigers of the plains—­the Sioux—­who were invincible on horseback but less skilful in canoes.  The rivers were beginning to freeze.  Boats were abandoned; but there was no snow for snow-shoe travelling, and the explorers were unable to transport the goods brought for trade.  Bidding the Crees go to their families and bring back slaves to carry the baggage, Radisson and Groseillers built themselves the first fort and the first fur post between the Missouri and the North Pole.  It was evidently somewhere west of Duluth in either what is now Minnesota or northwestern Ontario.

This fur post was the first habitation of civilization in all the Great Northwest.  Not the railway, not the cattle trail, not the path of forward-marching empire purposely hewing a way through the wilderness, opened the West.  It was the fur trade that found the West.  It was the fur trade that explored the West.  It was the fur trade that wrested the West from savagery.  The beginning was in the little fort built by Radisson and Groseillers.  No great factor in human progress ever had a more insignificant beginning.