At one place, called Fond du Lac, the house was somewhat less primitive than at our previous halting-places.  Our host was a doctor of cultivated mind, living alone with his family, of whom two, girls, were very pretty.  They made us a cranberry tart, on the memory of which my grateful palate lingers yet.  The worthy doctor was armed to the teeth, for he had no white neighbours, and over two hundred Indians, so he told me, prowling around him.  He lent me a gun, with which I went out shooting, and as a matter of fact I did meet a considerable number of Redskins.  As long as they can find game, and here it was plentiful, they are, as a rule, tolerably inoffensive.  Yet these were the remnant of warlike tribes which had never been thoroughly subjugated, and there was a hill, not very far off, called “Deadman’s Butts,” in memory of a fight waged between them and the French army, backed by three thousand Chippewa Indians, which ended in a terrible massacre.  Notwithstanding the presence of such neighbours, my host had chosen the spot where he had pitched his tent right well, for I saw on a map of Wisconsin, which I chanced to look at many years later, that Fond du Lac had become a town, with railways running to and from it.

Leaving Fond du Lac, we found ourselves on the prairie, stretching wide as far as the eye could see; dry yellowish grass (it was the end of October) covered the slightly undulating plain, with here and there a scanty clump of trees.  It constitutes the plateau (not a very high one) which separates the Mississippi river system from that of the St. Lawrence.  Our horses cantered gaily over the frozen ground.  All at once we saw a big animal running away from us at a kind of amble.  We urged forward our mounts in pursuit, and got up just in time to see it enter a clump of brushwood, not fifty paces across.  An Indian, who acted as our guide, went into the thicket after it, gun in hand.  A dreadful roar, which terrified our horses, was followed by the appearance of the infuriated animal.  It was a puma, or panther without spots, which galloped in a circle round M. de Montholon’s horse, and then retreated into a larger clump of trees, where we thought it prudent to leave it, as our only arm was a single-barrelled small-bore rifle.  Somewhat further on we saw a big cloud gather on the horizon and rapidly approach us.  The prairie was on fire.  We then took the well-known plan of setting it on fire ourselves just where we were.  Within less than five minutes our fire had run a mile before the wind, going as fast as a horse can gallop, with a noise like a distant rattle of musketry.  We and our horses entered the space we had set on fire ourselves, while the big conflagration in the distance, finding no food in front, fled away to our right and left.  I afterwards saw the same sight at night.  It was most beautiful.