2

father of the explorer, and that the former's widow married Sébastien Hayet, by whom she had three daughters, Marguerite, Françoise, and Elizabeth. But as Marguerite was married for the first time in 1646, and as our explorer was not out of his teens in 1651, he was undoubtedly younger than she; therefore Sulte's position cannot be supported. That there were at Three Rivers two men named Pierre-Esprit Radisson, and that they were not father and son, are made still more certain by the fact that the parents of Elizabeth Radisson came from the parish of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardonnet, in Paris, whereas Sébastien Hayet-Radisson and his family came from St. Malo, in Brit tany. It is certainly reasonable to suppose that the young Pierre came from the same part of France that his father did. Groseilliers was considerably older than his dashing companion. As to the place of his birth, there is some dispute. The Genealogical Dictionary of Canadian Families states that he was a native of Charly-St.-Cyr, in Brie, a parish which cannot now be located, but which may have been where now stands the modern market-town of St. Cyr-sur-Morin,' a short distance from Meaux. Sulte states that the parents of Groseilliers lived at Charly, parish of St. Cyr, in Brie; but Dionne asserts that Groseilliers was a native of Touraine, and in support of his position he quotes Mother Mary of the Incarnation. "Some time since," the reverend mother wrote to her son in 1670, "a Frenchman of our Touraine, named des Groseilliers, was married in this country. * * He was very young when he came here, and he cultivated my acquaintance because of our country, and also in consideration of one of our mothers of Tours, with whose father he had lived." Sulte says that before Groseilliers came to America, he served at Tours in the family of Savonnière de la Trouche, whose daughter, Sister St. Bernard, went to Canada with Mother Mary of the Incarnation. Groseilliers' service in Tours would, in far-away Canada, entitle him to be called "a Frenchman of our Touraine," and it does not follow from the

'Sulte and Dionne.

2 Dionne.

3 Ibid.

reverend mother's letter, which Dionne quotes, that Groseilliers was a native of Touraine, "the garden of France." The Genealogical Dictionary and Sulte are probably right in stating that he was a native of Brie. His father was Médard Chouart, and his mother Marie Poirier. There is no evidence to show that they accompanied their son to New France, where he arrived not later than 1641, perhaps as early as 1637. He, too, was a youth when he arrived in New France. He entered the service of the Jesuits in the capacity of donné, or lay-helper, and he remained with them for a number of years. During this part of his career, he several times traversed the country between the French settlements and the villages of the Hurons, and in the course of his journeys acquired the Huron and Algonkin languages. Sulte says that Groseilliers, as early as 1645, went as far west as Lake Superior. The next year, he withdrew from the service of the Jesuits, and engaged in the fur-trade with the Hurons. In November of the same year, he became engaged in marriage to Marie Martin, a daughter of Abraham Martin, a pioneer pilot of the St. Lawrence; but instead of marrying her, Groseilliers, on September 3, 1647, became the husband of her sister Hélène, the childless widow of Claude Étienne. It is an interesting fact, that Groseilliers' first wife was not only the daughter of the man whose name the historic Plains of Abraham bear to this day, but that she was a god-daughter of the great Champlain himself, who bestowed upon her the Christian name of his child-wife, Hélène Boullé. By his first wife, Groseilliers had two children, one of whom died the day that it was born; while the other, bearing his father's name, has, like him, a place in history.

While Radisson was generally known as Radisson, and by no other name, the man with whose fortunes his became linked was indifferently called Groseilliers and Chouart. There is, in the whole province of Quebec, no land, no seignory, bearing the name of Groseilliers, although Chouart is often called the Sieur

1 Dionne.

Ibid.
Sulte.

'Dionne.

5

B Dionne, in a personal letter to the writer.

des Groseilliers. But by purchase, and by his marriage with the widow of Jean Véron, Groseilliers became possessed of considerable land in the vicinity of Three Rivers.'

Radisson relates that early in the year (1652) following his arrival in New France, the Iroquois captured him while he was hunting near Three Rivers, and took him to one of their cantonments in what is now the State of New York. After one futile attempt to escape, for which he was tortured and nearly killed, he succeeded in reaching Albany, known at that time as Fort Orange. He relates that at the fort he met a Jesuit who had been captured by the Iroquois, and that the Jesuit assisted him. In the fall of 1653, Father Poncet, who had been captured by the Iroquois during the previous August, was at Fort Orange, and he relates a conversation that he had at that time and place with a young man who had been captured by the Mohawks at Three Rivers. There is no doubt that it was Radisson whom the priest met at Fort Orange; the latter's testimony is important, for not only does it corroborate Radisson s story about his captivity and his escape, but, combined with Radisson's statement that his capture by the Mohawks occurred the year after he reached Three Rivers, it proves conclusively that it was in 1651 that Radisson arrived in New France, notwithstanding a statement by Sulte that he settled in New France before 1647. From Fort Orange, Radisson went by way of Manhattan (now New York) to Holland, thence to France, reappearing in May, 1654, at Three Rivers, where he had been given up for dead. Upon reaching home he found that his sister Marguerite had, during the preceding August, married Groseilliers. The friendship between Radisson and Groseilliers, who ever afterward were almost inseparable, dates from that time; their fortunes and their ambitions became one; they could not have been more firmly bound to each other had they been brothers in blood.

Radisson calls his captivity among the Mohawks, his "first voyage." Next in order and in number, in his published Journal, is a voyage which he says he made, as part of the colonizing expedition, and body-guard as well, which accompanied the

'Dionne.

Jesuits Ragueneau and Dupéron to the Onondaga country, in the spring of 1657. This expedition returned to the French settlements, after an almost miraculous escape from being massacred by the Iroquois, in April, 1658.1

Radisson next describes, in detail, two Western voyages which he and Groseilliers made after his return from the Onondaga mission. The first voyage, Radisson says, took three years, and during it Radisson claims that they explored the Mississippi River for a long distance. The second Western voyage was along the south shore of Lake Superior, to the Huron village near the headwaters of the Black River, and to the Sioux Indians in Northern Minnesota. Radisson says that this voyage included a trip to Hudson's Bay, and that it lasted two years.

2

There is a conflict of opinion as to the route that Radisson and Groseilliers followed in coming West, two French-Canadian writers asserting that they ascended the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, passed Niagara Falls, and navigated Lake Erie on their second voyage. Radisson, however, clearly intends to state. that on both voyages he and Groseilliers went up the Ottawa River, crossed Lake Nipissing, and descended French River to

1It is recorded, particularly by Mother Mary of the Incarnation, that a young Frenchman, who had been adopted by a famous Iroquois chief, told his Indian father that he had dreamt that he (the young Frenchman) would die unless a great feast was prepared and everything provided therefor eaten. The chief loved his adopted son, and, to save his life, as he thought,- for Indians are superstitious about dreams, he consented to the feast. The Indians, encouraged by his son and by other French who were in the colony, so gorged themselves that they fell asleep, allowing the French to steal away in boats, which had been secretly built. Dionne is positive that Radisson was the young hero of this interesting story. But Radisson does not mention figuring as the youthful strategist, and there is no evidence that he was that young Frenchman. It may have been Radisson, or it may have been some one else. French captives among the Iroquois were not rare.

? Dionne, in Chouart et Radisson, and L. A. Prud'homme, of St. Boniface, Manitoba, in Notes Historiques sur la vie de P. E. Radisson, published in 1892.

Lake Huron, the same route that Jean Nicolet followed when he visited Wisconsin in 1634.!

Describing the first voyage West, the "third voyage" of his Journal, Radisson says that he and Groseilliers, with some of the Indians that had formed their party as far as the mouth of French River, went toward the South; and that while on this course they passed the place where the Jesuit fathers had lived, meaning the destroyed missions among the Hurons, near the mouth of River Wye, Georgian Bay; and he virtually says that his party made almost a complete circuit of Lake Huron, "after * many days" arriving at a large island, where we found their [Huron companions] village, their wives & children. You must know that we passed a strait some 3 leagues beyond that place. The wildmen give it a name; it is another lake, but not so bigg as that we passed before. We calle it the lake of the staring hairs, because those that live about it have their hair like a brush turned up." Several writers, the late Edward D. Neill among the number, contend

*

*

'Radisson speaks of ascending the "river of the meadows," of crossing the "lake of the castors," and of going down the "river of the sorcerers," to the "first great lake." Between the time that it was known as the Grand River of the Algonkins, the name which Champlain gave it, and the time that it became known by its present name, the Ottawa River was called the River of the Prairies, as we learn in the Jesuit Relations. In French, prairie is equivalent to meadow in English, and in writing English, Radisson used the term "meadow." The "lake of the castors" is Lake Nipissing, which got the name that Radisson gave it, either from the fact that the Amikoue (beaver or castor) Indians dwelt not far from it, or from the abundance of beavers in the lake at one time. Radisson's "river of the sorcerers," upon which he and Groseilliers descended to the "first great lake," is French River, along which dwelt the Nipissing Indians, who, as the Relations inform us, were called sorcerers because they practiced magic more than other Indians. The "first great lake" is of course Lake Huron. See also, Butterfield, Discovery of the Northwest in 1634, p. 47, ? Perrot and the Jesuit Relations lead one to believe that the Hurons, after fleeing from their own country in 1651, spent several years in the vicinity of Mackinac. In 1653 they, or some of them, were at the Huron Islands, also called Pottawattomie Islands, at the mouth of Green Bay. The Hurons had certainly left Manitoulin before Radisson's first Western voyage.

3 Wis. Hist. Colls., x., p. 293.