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Pathfinders of the West
CHAPTER I
1651-1653
RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE
The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk
Valley--In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the
Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape
Early one morning in the spring of 1652 three young men left the little
stockaded fort of Three Rivers, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence,
for a day's hunting in the marshes of Lake St. Peter. On one side were
the forested hills, purple with the mists of rising vapor and still
streaked with white patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the
sunlight. On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence,
more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of
rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese
flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just
as they do to-day. Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice
poured their spring flood into the St. Lawrence.
The hunters were very young. Only hunters rash with the courage of
untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all
the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the
little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year.
Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three
Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois.
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